


a tempest, a cyclone, a goddamned hurricane

by Dialux



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, BAMF Women, Gen, Stark family feels, Unreliable Narrator, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 07:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12008379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: There’s nobody named Lyarra in Winterfell, according to her father; the last person who bore that name was his mother, and she was buried decades ago.Sansa speaks to her the next week.[Sansa can speak to ghosts, and this changes everything.]





	1. you are not his princess; you are your own queen

**Author's Note:**

> This is... an AU that just keeps growing, lol. The premise is that Sansa can see ghosts, but the actual world-building behind that will be explored in greater depth next chapter.

When Sansa is three years old, she sneaks away from her nurse’s watchful eyes and into the godswood. Her father had taken Robb there, not quite a week previous, and Sansa had felt furious at being left out.

And though she’s now in the godswood, there’s nothing special here; only cold air and a tree with leaves as large as her face, as bright as her hair.

Sansa is cold, and hungry. After some finagling, she curls into a hollow beneath the base of the white tree, huddled for warmth. She doesn’t cry, exactly, but she wants to- her mother and father likely won’t find her, not here, and even if they did they’d start yelling, and she hates that, hates it deeply.

Then she hears a voice.

“Come out, little one,” says a woman, her dark hair plaited back in a fashion that Sansa’s never seen before. Her eyes find Sansa unerringly, and she waits for her to clamber out of the roots with an expression that’s both disappointed and loving. “Your parents are looking for you,” she says, and her hands brush over the godswood leaves resting on Sansa’s shoulders light enough that she can’t feel it. “Now clean yourself up, sweetling. I’ll take you home, don’t you fear.”

The woman does. Sansa is in her chambers, wrapped up warm and toasty in her blankets, when she asks the woman her name.

“Lyarra,” says the woman.

She steps out of the room, and when her parents ask her where she was, who brought her back- well. There’s nobody named Lyarra in Winterfell, according to her father; the last person who bore that name was his mother, and she was buried decades ago.

Sansa speaks to her the next week.

…

“Father says your name can’t be Lyarra.”

“Your father,” says the woman, “does not know everything.”

Sansa bites her lip. “He says his mother’s name was Lyarra.”

“His mother’s name _is_ Lyarra,” says the woman sharply. “It always will be. Death does not take away names.”

“Are you her?” She asks softly. “Are you my grandmother?”

The woman- Lyarra- steps closer, and her stardust hand rests light on Sansa’s brow.

“Yes,” she whispers.

…

Sansa is three years old when she realizes that she sees ghosts.

Ghosts of starlight and dust, pale as the full moon. Lovely and shadowed and _real,_ as nobody else would believe. She might have whispered her secret to someone, but Lyarra stops her.

 _Those who choose not to see cannot be forced,_ she says, eyes large and sad and as cold as Sansa’s father’s. _They will envy your powers, sweetling, and they will break what they envy. Promise me, Sansa: you will not tell anyone about your powers._

…

It takes Sansa more than a decade to understand that her grandmother only ever tried to protect her.

…

There are other ghosts: long-haired Cregan; her own namesake, Sansa; warm-eyed Beron; sharp-tongued Alysanne. They are loud, sometimes, and angry at others. Sansa tiptoes around Artos and Donnor whenever the year turns- they both blame each other for Errold’s death, and Errold died the night before the year turned new. Melantha and Marna scream at each other during the solstices, but they only do so during the night.

There are other ghosts, but the one Sansa’s closest to is her grandmother. Lyarra is unfailingly patient, and breathtakingly witty. When Sansa bores of sitting quietly, she tells her stories of her travels through the south, her days in the mountains, her years as Lady of Winterfell.

The hardest thing for Sansa then is to keep her face blank, to bite back her questions until night.

(But even as Sansa is closest to Lyarra, she charms the ghosts of Winterfell, one by one. You see: no matter the universe, she’s always been the charming one.)

…

But for all Sansa’s happiness, there is grief eating away behind it like a cancer.

There are no ghosts inside Winterfell that Sansa can name aunt or uncle or grandfather. And for all that Lyarra never weeps, she looks the saddest the day Sansa asks after them.

“They went south,” she tells Sansa, once, kneeling, her hands resting on Sansa’s shoulders, weightless as light. “They died there. Lyanna died in Dorne, and Brandon and Rickard in King’s Landing. They were killed, sweetling.”

“Who killed them?”

Lyarra rises, and looks past Sansa, straight to the knot of furs that is Robb and Jon, wrestling in the snow.

“The Targaryens,” she says. Then, firmly, “When you’re older, I shall tell you everything.”

…

The ghosts are kind, after a fashion. They tell her stories, sometimes, and sing when Sansa asks particularly charmingly. Sansa cannot control them, cannot force anything of them; they are of another realm, and all she can do is bear silent witness.

Sansa cannot control them, but she can love them.

…

When Lyarra tells her how the Starks died, Sansa does not shiver. She bends her head forwards, lets the red strands slip over her face like a shroud, and then looks back at Lyarra.

“How do you know?” She asks, and does not think at all of burned flesh or screams.

“We ghosts speak to each other,” murmurs Lyarra, eyes wide and pale as a snow-drift. “We gossip, for the afterlife is rather boring. And news of a Targaryen monarch burning a Lord of a Great House alive is interesting, indeed- word came quickly. But that wasn’t the biggest secret, sweetling, of the war.”

Sansa frowns. “What was?”

“Lyanna died in Dorne,” says Lyarra. “My wolf-daughter, my ice-daughter, she died in those ugly desert sands. But all of her did not die there. Ned brought back a little child, with a face as Stark as they come.”

“I have a cousin?” Sansa asks, eyes lighting up.

Lyarra smiles, small and bitter. “You can never tell.”

“Never,” vows Sansa.

After a moment, Lyarra winds around Sansa and presses cold, weightless lips to her ear.

“Jon,” she breathes, and Sansa never looks at her father the same again.

…

Years pass. Sansa laughs and loves and _lives._

When the castle sleeps she slips out of bed and listens to the stories of her ancestors. She complains about Arya to Sarra. She begs Torrhen for stories of the dragons and learns what the North looked like, under the old Kings of Winter. She dances, sometimes, under the full moon, and the ghosts converge around her like wings of pearl and silvered dust.

…

When the King comes, Sansa is flawless in her courtesies.

She flushes a brilliant red when Prince Joffrey smiles at her, something budding inside her like a blossom. Her mother’s lips curl upwards at the sight, and Sansa makes sure to braid her hair as neatly as she can over a soft new dress.

The King announces their betrothal that night, in the feasting hall. Sansa smiles prettily, elegantly, as southron-lovely as the queen; she wears a gown of starlit-silver, grey and warm and shining as all the ghosts that crowd the halls of her home.

 _Do not leave the North,_ Lyarra had told her, quietly, that morning. _Do not go south. I have lost- so much to it. My husband, my son, my daughter, my sister- I do not wish to lose you as well. Please, Sansa-_

But Sansa is not a Stark alone.

She is a Tully, half, born and bred; she has a grandmother who was a Whent and another who was a Flint, and she will be as unyielding as all of them. She will be her mother’s daughter and her father’s heir and the North’s pride, and she will return someday- she will return, with a crown on her head or not; but she will walk back.

 _I will survive,_ Sansa had promised her, hands freezing in Lyarra’s grasp. _I will see you again._

…

“Be careful,” Lyarra tells her, softly. “That one- he’ll love himself far more than he ever loves you.”

“Sansa tells me that he reminds her of her husband.” Sansa lifts her head, watches Lyarra closely. Sansa- who married her uncle, who had her inheritance stolen from her through Jonnel Stark’s greed- rarely names any man like her husband. It’s not a compliment when she does. “But- a _prince,_ Grandmother! He’d certainly be kinder than Jonnel.”

“That’s not difficult,” Lyarra snorts. Then, voice dark and sharp, “And princes can be just as cruel as other men. Do not forget that, Sansa. They are still men. They are still as flawed, and terrible, and unkind.”

…

“Sansa!”

It’s Serena that shrieks her name, and Sansa pauses for all of a heartbeat before she picks up her skirts and runs, towards Serena, towards the crowding ghosts.

She freezes when she sees the small, broken body on the grass.

(The blood- for a long, terrible moment, Sansa’s sure Bran is dead.)

…

“Who pushed him?” Sansa demands, as soon as she slams the door shut.

She turns, and there in front of her stands Lyarra. Her hair is unbound, now, and the dark strands whip over her face as if stirred by a wind. The grief on her grandmother’s face makes something deep in Sansa’s chest clench.

“Bran doesn’t fall,” says Sansa. “He hasn’t. Not once. Tell me, tell me truly: _who pushed him?”_

“I don’t know,” says Lyarra.

Sansa inhales slowly. “You’re lying,” she says coldly.

“I’m not,” she repeats, holding up a hand. “But I know who does. Tell me, do you know of Brandon Snow?”

“Torrhen’s brother?”

“The very same.”

“I- yes,” says Sansa. “But I’ve never spoken to him.”

Lyarra looks grimly amused. “Follow me. I’ll take you to him.”

Sansa follows her past the hallways, slipping through the shadows with the careless ease of a girl long used to it; the nights that she has spent alone save for ghosts of starlight are countless. Her feet are soundless against the cold stone.

Lyarra leads her to the godswood and bids her to stand still. Sansa obeys, and as promised, a ghost appears after a few minutes- young, with dark hair that curls at the edges like Robb’s. His eyes are even paler than her father’s.

“Lyarra said you wished to speak to me.”

Sansa raises her chin. “Yes,” she says. “She told me that you know who pushed Bran. That you were the only one to see what happened.”

“I was,” he says, and she’s never before heard such disdain poured into two syllables. “But why should I tell you?”

“Because I’m his _sister,”_ she says.

Brandon arches an eyebrow. “And what will you do with this information? You will tell no one; you will simply turn your face and look away. Why should I tell you something that won’t do anything?”

Sansa looks away, tears filling her eyes. But it is only the truth, what he says; and though she wants to deny it, she can’t. It is hard, and cold, like a cut of silver and steel. She is only a girl, and even more than that- she will never tell anyone the truth. That secret is stamped into her heart.

But she is still Bran’s sister.

“If Torrhen had fought,” she says, suddenly, and Brandon looks back at her. “If he had fought, and if he had fallen, do you think you would have knelt easily? Do you think that if Aegon had destroyed your forces, you would have bent the knee? Do you think that if you _did-_ you would have meant any of it?” She lifts her eyes to meet his, as steady as she can make them. “Bran is my brother, and he might die, and I want to know _why.”_

He looks at her, and then away, and then back again. For just a moment, he looks more grieved than she’s ever seen a boy that age look, more than she’s ever seen even Lyarra look, and she’s the saddest person Sansa knows.

“It was a Lannister,” he says abruptly. “Looks right similar to Loren Lannister- I’ll never forget that smug fool’s golden hair. Probably his descendant.”

Sansa breathes in, slowly. “Was he- how old was he?”

“Seen thirty namedays, or close enough.”

A golden-haired Lannister, middle-aged. There is only one man who can be that in all the kingdoms. Sansa wants to panic, and feels her breaths shorten slightly; but everything seems very far away at the moment, and numb.

“Thank you,” she says, and walks back into the keep, stiffly.

…

The last thing Sansa wants is to leave Winterfell.

And she does her best to avoid it: she claims illness, and then fear for Bran, and then fear of the south- but nothing sways her father.

“You can rest in the queen’s own wheelhouse,” he told her. “There is nothing you can do for Bran, sweetling; and there is nothing to fear in King’s Landing. I shall be there, I swear it.”

Sansa watches the curtains fall shut and then turns to face Cersei Lannister. The bitterness across her tongue is sharp and acrid, and she cannot name it to be anger or hatred. In response, she averts her eyes and ducks her head, and when she chances a look up, she realizes what it’s been taken as: fear.

 _No matter,_ she thinks, then, hands tightening around each other silently. She remembers the strength that comes from silence, the strength that Berena insisted she never discount; Sansa will hold to her silence, and she will not let the sister of a kingslaying brother-killer frighten her. _No matter, I shall survive._

_And Jaime Lannister shall pay the price._

…

When she leaves, the ghosts gather around her as a thousand sheets of silver, sparking through the cold winter air. Serena spins a thread of silver through the air, and Eddara kisses her with frozen, yielding lips; Beron embraces her, arms cold, eyes warm.

It’s Lyarra who holds her after they leave.

“Listen to me,” she says, quietly. _“Listen_ to me, girl. You are going south, to marry a boy who will only ever look at you as a piece of chattel bought and paid for with a crown.”

“I am going to marry a _prince,”_ Sansa replies, sharply.

Only for Lyarra to smile, bitter and cold. Only for the wind to chill, frost creeping in whorls over her hair.

“And he is a man,” she says. “He is still as flawed, and terrible, and unkind as the rest of them.”

Sansa’s _heard_ this before, she remembers it well; she doesn’t want to listen to a repeat of-

“He is a man,” says Lyarra, “and he can yet bleed.”

“I-” Sansa falters. “What?”

“He is a man,” she bites out. “He may be a prince, and he may become a king, but he has blood in his veins and if he hurts you- if he lays a single hand on you- you will pay it back to him tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold. You are my granddaughter. You are Sansa Stark of Winterfell, of the blood of the North, and you will not break there.”

Lyarra wrenches her chin up, fingers frozen and biting. “You _will_ come back to me,” she says, and it sounds like a truth-telling, like a dream-seeing, like a fortune-whisper.

“Yes,” says Sansa.

The heartwood’s leaves rustle, though there’s no wind, and as Sansa looks up- she sees it. A single tear, the first she’s ever seen Lyarra shed, falling down her cheek. When it lands on the snow it disappears.

 _Goodbye,_ Sansa thinks, and when she leaves it aches in her chest like a roasted chestnut.

…

Cersei is to be her goodmother. Sansa does her best to avoid her, and mostly succeeds; it is only inside the wheelhouse that she is forced to be in close contact with her, and after a few days of awkward silence, Cersei utterly ignores her for even that period.

Sansa is homesick, and she wants Lyarra with a yearning that almost makes her feverish. She hasn’t been away from her for longer than a few days at the most, and even then there were other ghosts to keep her company. Now there’s nobody beside her in this wooden box save for the living.

And Lady is in Winterfell, still, because Sansa refused to bring her wolf along while she was certain her father would send her back; now, of course, she wishes she hadn’t been so foolish- but she had been, and must bear the consequences.

(Her shoulders still tremble, every time she enters the litter. Her glares at the Kingslayer are mistaken, thankfully, for the besotted looks of a lovelorn girl.

Joffrey doesn’t like it, but Sansa has more important things on her mind than his happiness.)

…

When they land in the Red Keep, the cacophony of ghosts almost makes her cringe.

Sansa straightens stiffly, and bears through the roar. She has kept this secret for years now; she won’t give it up so quickly. Anyhow, it only sounds as loud as it does because she is unused to it. Winterfell had even more ghosts, and Sansa’d learned to tune them out easily enough.

…

That afternoon, she is alone for the first time.

Sansa runs a hand down the soft wool of her gown and swallows through a dry throat before summoning a smile and turning to the pearly figure standing before the window.

“Hello,” she says. The ghost doesn’t turn, assuming she isn’t speaking to her. Sansa firms her voice and says, steadily, “I can see you.”

By that night, the entire city knows she can see ghosts.

…

It takes three days for the news to truly percolate through the ranks, or perhaps three days for him to work up the nerve; whatever the reason, Brandon comes to see her on her fourth day in King’s Landing.

Sansa doesn’t know who he is- but he is tall, and the curve of his jaw is similar to her father’s, and the tilt to his hair is startlingly reminiscent of Robb’s and Brandon Snow’s. She offers him a small smile.

“My lord,” she greets. “My name is Sansa Stark, eld-”

“-eldest daughter of Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell.” He studies her, closely, and doesn’t seem to care for either his rudeness or that the silence between them has become awkward. “Yes, I know,” he tells her after a long minute.

“But I do not know you,” she reminds him, trying hard not to let her tone get arch or impertinent.

He smiles, like a flash of sunlight in a blizzard: blinding.

“Brandon Stark,” he says, sweeping a courtly bow. “And let me assure you, my lady, it is a relief to speak to someone whose heart still beats.” When he looks up at her, through his lashes, it is a look so obviously Lyarra’s that Sansa gets a lump in her throat.

“The honor is mine,” she says, speaking through the lump. Then, unable to stop herself, she continues: “Your mother misses you.” Brandon stills, but the flood of words goes on as if it were truly a torrent, unstoppable. “She was very close to me, in Winterfell. She doesn’t cry much, but she looks saddest when talking about you, and she never forgot you. You or your father or your sister. Lyarra-” Sansa falters, slightly, finally, but finishes the sentence. “Lyarra loves you.”

After another long silence, Brandon’s face breaks into a smile. It doesn’t look truly honest, but the effort is there, and his voice is warm when he says, “You must tell me everything about her.”

…

Her grandfather doesn’t come to her, and Sansa doesn’t ask.

There are other ghosts, of course, and over time Sansa learns the places they haunt, the places to avoid, the places to visit. She laughs with some, and begs stories of others, and for a time it is- nice.

Or if it isn’t nice, then it is a close enough facsimile.

…

With Sansa refusing to bring her wolf, Arya had not had a leg to stand on when their father refused. She’d huffed and glared and fought, but it hadn’t made an ounce of difference. That unfairness had left Arya furious at Sansa.

But the rage still prickles at her skin, and she starts to avoid Arya as well, soon after that.

…

It is a warm day when three ghosts materialize, one after the other, each looking wild and terrified with it- Sansa is happy, content, right up until they tell her to _run,_ and not look behind her.

“Lannisters,” one snaps, and Sansa pales.

“They’ve arrested your father,” another says. “Wait, don’t go now-” Sansa skids to a halt before she turns the corner, and hears the clank of armor; after a moment, the ghost nods.

Barring the door is difficult, but the ghosts help her, tell her what to do. Sansa hides, there, with Betha Blackwood and Shaera Targaryen. Fear pounds in time to her heart, and she trembles; she is a child, after all.

But she is not alone, and ghosts flow through the door slowly, in a long, winding chain, bringing her news. After a few hours, Brandon enters and seats himself beside her.

“Ned’s leg is badly injured,” he tells her. “Worse than before, I mean. He’s in the Black Cells. Arya’s escaped into the city, though; I was with her, making sure she’s fine. She’ll survive.”

Sansa swallows and looks away. “I don’t- what does it matter, telling me anything? I can do nothing. I am a _fool-”_

“You aren’t the first Stark to speak to ghosts,” Brandon says, looking at her as if surprised. “You are young, yes, but this is a blessing from the old gods. They have given you the power to touch dreams, don’t you see?”

“No,” says Sansa, frowning. “No, I don’t. Dreams?”

Betha’s eyes are narrowed thoughtfully, but her daughter only shakes her head.

“It is a Northerner custom,” Shaera says. “I’ve not heard of it.”

A voice says, from the doorway- “It is a legend told by the First Men.” A man steps in, and when he comes to stand beside Brandon, the similarity is unmistakable. “Sarra was the first, and then Arrana after her; Cregard had a touch of it, and Beron did as well, but none so strong as Jocelyn.” Rickard Stark nods to her. “And after her, there is you.”

“What can I do?” Sansa asks, not looking away from him.

Rickard shifts, slightly. “They called it dreamwords: a way to walk in dreams and change the landscape. It is difficult, Sansa, make no mistake. Difficult and dangerous. You must not treat this lightly.”

“I will not,” she says slowly. “But- just- why does Father not know this?”

“Ned’s always been more trusting of his own own eyes than anything else,” says Brandon. “And it wasn’t anything Father thought important."

“But my father is imprisoned, is he not? And I have seen what mercy Lannisters are capable of. If the King is truly dead, then they will not show kindness to my father. Not if his accusations of bastardy are true. And if Father is in danger, then I am alone; and then, I must do _something._ I could never live with myself if I let him die because I was afraid.”

Rickard doesn’t respond immediately. When he does, his eyes lighten with some form of amusement.

“You look nothing like a Stark,” he tells her, grimly, amusedly. “But there is a wolf in you, child, and a dreamspeaker yet. Come, let us do this.”

…

It takes her some tries- these are muscles that Sansa has never used before, and so they are atrophied; aching with disuse. But she flexes, and then she tries more, and before she knows it she is standing outside of a door, decorated with scrolls of gold and dark, pinkish-red marble.

 _You will falter,_ Rickard had told her, hands resting lightly on her shoulders, eyes as undying-brilliant as if he had never been burned alive. _You will fail. But you must try again, and again, and again. Walk in dreams, dreamspeaker, and craft the stories you will._

Sansa flinches, now, at the smell: rank meat, and sweat. She takes one step forwards and knocks on the door, and the sound echoes like a gong. The guardsman’s dream she is inside shatters like a stained glass window, and Sansa finds herself back in her own body, trembling.

“A sleeping guard,” she says, to the room. “He’s- close by. But I think I woke him.”

Rickard nods. “It does not matter, how careless you were. There is no time for delicacy, not if you are to save your father. Now, try again.”

Sansa’s head aches, but she doesn’t let that stop her.

…

They break the door down hours later. Sansa meets the guards with a shaking, red-scrubbed face, and doesn’t once ask about Arya. The next morning, she goes to the sept with a sack of food and cloth, which she distributes amongst the poor. After, she goes to the godswood.

…

Two nights later, she feels confident enough in her skills. Rickard looks faintly dubious, but Brandon nods.

Sansa pinches out the candles and lets her eyes slip shut. Her mind flutters, leaping from one person to the next, spiralling further and further, deeper into the bowels of the castle. She lands, finally, in a mind that had faint echoes of her own- older, more worn, but with something similar all the same.

He was asleep, but Sansa hasn’t the subtlety to maintain that yet. She places one foot directly in the land of living, and maintains the other in the land of dreams, and she yanks- or something close enough to the action that it has no other name.

Then she turns, and- in this half-dream state, she cannot control her father’s body. Instead, she leaps into the mind of the man who is guarding her father, and reforms his dream so that he is facing thirty Ironborn soldiers, and watches him scramble into the cell in a desperate attempt to stop it; she shoves him deeper into sleep and leaps back into her father’s mind, slotting what she can into place, frantically-

-he inhales sharply when the ghosts shimmer into view, but still doesn’t wake. Sansa holds tight to the dream-world, hoping Brandon understands what she is doing as her father reaches for the keys and unlocks himself.

So long as Sansa remains in his mind, her father can see the ghosts. Sansa can only remain in his mind while he sleeps- and so she keeps his thoughts fuzzy, forces herself to maintain her calm.

Brandon and various other ghosts help them- they form an honor guard, and an advance guard as well. They scout ahead and tell Sansa in her father’s body where to go, when to go.

They end up in the godswood, and Sansa leads her father to the sack of food and clothes she managed to scurry away. There is nothing more she can offer, not even a knife; but her father is smart. He is smart and quick and _strong-_ and there is nothing more Sansa could do, even if she wanted to.

“I love you,” she says, letting the words echo in his mind, letting the words fade. Then, louder, so that this time he’ll remember, so that he’ll wake: “I love you, Father.”

He wakes with a gasp, and Sansa is thrown back into her own mind, trembling. Rickard looks at her sadly, and Naerys gestures towards a cloth. Her head is aching, and the tears that drip down her face are of blood.

But her father is gone from these monsters, and that leaves her limbs quivering with relief.

…

Rickard disappears, after that. Sansa asks after him, and Brandon purses his lips; sighs.

“Father loved my mother,” he says, quietly. “And he’s- he’s spent too long in the North. He can’t bear this castle, this… life. He hates it. Even speaking to you took too much effort.” He shrugs, and Sansa can see sadness lining the shadowed curve of his throat; she wonders, at it. Surely, surely, pain ought to stop at death- but, clearly, there are some things that are eternal.

Grief chief amongst them: for even with everything taken from them, humanity has mourning carved into their bones, engraved into their souls.

…

The Lannisters still don’t take Sansa seriously.

Sansa expresses only fear when they tell her that her father has abandoned her- she cringes, weeps, babbles. The ghosts circle her, offer her comfort, and Sansa learns to look through her lashes, learns to bend her head and still look prideful.

Brandon spends his days with Sansa, but his nights with Arya. It is meager protection- one ghost against a deadly world- but it is a relief for Sansa, one that tells her that her sister is at least alive and surviving.

It isn’t enough, however: the Lannisters will find Arya, sooner or later, if she remains in the city. Sansa doesn’t have the strength yet to pick her sister’s mind out of an entire city- she has to do _something_ before Arya becomes just as much of a glorified prisoner as Sansa herself.

Brandon helps. He goes hunting for a boat, because the Lannisters likely wouldn’t search the seas as closely as they’d look over land. Two weeks later, he enters and nods, and hope lights up her stomach, her throat.

Two weeks later, she wraps herself in brown wool and takes a bag stuffed full of bread and preserves, a few clothes, some small bits of money that the ghosts helped find in the shadows of the keep- her boots are sensible, and her cloak is sturdy.

The ghosts tell her where to go, when to walk forwards, when to stay silent. Sansa keeps her head down and makes her way as quickly as possible into the twisted, narrow streets of Flea Bottom.

Brandon leads her to Arya fairly easily, but her sister has decided to spend the night wedged between two buildings, hidden behind two large clay pots; Sansa can’t reach her without climbing the wall, and she’s not about to do _that-_

It takes her a full hour, three thrown stones, and two close calls with the City’s Guard before Arya comes down irritably.

Her narrowed eyes widen when she recognizes Sansa.

“What’re you _doing_ here?”

“We have to leave,” whispers Sansa, stepping forwards, embracing Arya tightly. There is a sort of unspeakable relief in having someone’s actual physical _body_ in her arms, and Sansa almost weeps at the feeling. “The Lannisters… they pushed Bran, Arya. The Kingslayer. And they would’ve killed Father, I know it. If we aren’t careful, they’ll kill us too.”

“What’re you saying?” Arya asks, but she’s already lacing her boots up, already belting her thin sword to her waist. “What are you _saying,_ Sansa?”

“That we have to leave.”

Arya shakes her head. “We aren’t going to be able to get anywhere. They-”

“If you’re going to continue _talking,”_ Brandon snaps from behind Sansa, “get behind some cover and do it quietly. And hurry! We don’t have much time.”

“I know of a way,” Sansa says, grabbing Arya’s wrist and dragging her towards the shadows of a nearby tree. Arya’s face bulges with her indignance, but Sansa wrestles her behind it, using her greater height to her advantage; a moment later, three guardsmen canter through the street, and Arya relaxes minutely. “Now, come _on.”_

They slip between buildings, silently. Sansa doesn’t let Arya’s hand go the entire time.

…

But they’re too late.

The fisherman’s boat that Brandon had spied out is cut from the moors by the time they arrive at the dock- the owner must have decided to get some early fishing done. Sansa pales at the sight and turns an accusing look on her uncle.

He leaps into action, trying to find something else that can take them that won’t be missed quickly; Sansa communicates this to Arya, quietly, and is climbing over ropes when Betha appears in front of her. Her eyes are wide, and her black hair whips about her in an agitated wind.

“King’s men,” she says. “They know you’re missing.”

Sansa feels her nails cut into the meat of her palm. “We can’t- we can’t take a boat.”

Arya turns and looks at her sharply. Sansa ignores her.

“Not fast enough,” she stresses. “They’ll be on us as soon as we land. We have to…” Slowly, she turns towards Arya. “Oh,” Sansa says softly.

“What?” Arya snaps.

“Not we,” Sansa replies, reaching for the sack of food and cloth she’s held so tightly. She shoves it towards her sister. “You.”

Arya takes it, clutches it. “What do you mean?”

“The Lannisters are coming,” Sansa tells her, ducking under ropes and sweeping her hair behind her, loosening the hood so the sun catches the brilliant red of her hair. “Don’t take a boat, Arya. Stick to the shoreline for another day, and then follow the Kingsroad- you know the way. And don’t stop, alright? Just go- go north. To Riverrun. Mother’s family will keep us safe, I promise.”

“Not without you,” says Arya, eyes narrowing. “I’m not going anywhere without you, Sansa-”

“I’ll be fine.” Sansa smiles wanly at her. “But keep that sword handy, alright? And keep your head down. I’ll see you soon.”

“I’m not-”

“You _are,”_ says Sansa, and feels tears well up, swallows them. “Tell Father that I love him, alright? And the same thing to the others. Robb, Bran, Rickon, Mother- tell them that I miss them. And that I’ll see them soon.”

The dawnlight illuminates Arya’s face, a rictus of horror. Sansa breathes out and stumbles off the mooring, and avoids the knowing pity on Betha’s face, in Alysanne’s eyes. She can hear Arya trying to follow her.

 _No._ Sansa looks around her, and there- right there- there’s a pile of rigging- _There will be only one Stark left in King’s Landing by tonight._

Sansa shoves the rigging as hard as she can. The splash is loud enough to draw attention of the entire pier. Then she’s running.

It’s hard work in a skirt, no matter how loose it is. Her boots pinch, and she very purposely flees towards the troops, not away. Her heart is pounding. She can see, from the corner of her eye, the silvered outlines of the ghosts- they’re keeping time with her. Sansa stumbles to a halt at the opposite edge of the pier, still ignored by half the people on it, and realizes that there’s nothing she can do to gain the men’s attention without either taking a boat and setting sail- or yelling loudly.

No: _screaming._

Saying _“look at me”_ might have been suspicious, but wordless screams sounded hysterical enough to forgive. And with her head uncovered, the delicate dragonfly necklace she wears- Sansa is easily found, easily recognized.

Their hands are not gentle when they drag her back, but neither are they particularly rough. The tears that drip down her cheeks are not entirely unfeigned.

(The smile is harder to conceal.)

…

“Courage,” Naerys tells her, face pale and thin in the darkness. “You must have courage, Lady Stark.”

Betha laughs, harshly. “She has far more courage than any of us ever will. Intelligence, too. No- you must have faith, Sansa: faith in yourself.”

“They will kill me,” Sansa murmurs, hands curving away from each other. There is relief, on the one hand, that Arya is safe; on the other, there is fear for herself. “How can I stop them?”

“They call you a traitor’s daughter,” says Brandon, materializing into the cell. His eyes are narrowed, and it is anger that thrums inside of him, hot and bright as liquid silver. “The Lannister Queen wants you skinned, but the Imp is talking her down from it. With only one hostage left to them, they can’t hurt you. But- be careful, Sansa.”

She nods, and that is that.

…

“Traitor,” Joffrey hisses, and Sansa says nothing.

The court seethes, twisting and roiling, waiting eagerly to see the disgrace of one of their own; Sansa simply lifts her chin high and meets Joffrey’s gaze. A heartbeat too late, she recognizes that pride was an incorrect path to take- Joffrey’s mouth twists, and his eyes go flat, and she can see her death echoing in them.

“Treason shall never go unpunished,” he bites out, raw in his fury.

Meryn Trant’s sword lights a line of fire down her spine, and Sansa shrinks away, stumbling. She doesn’t bother to beg. Over the roar of her heartbeat, she hears Brandon howling, screaming curses and threats, and yet: useless. Her knees fall to the floor, echoing vibrations up through her body, and she bows her head, spine curving like a vase’s arch into the ground.

“I think my lady is overdressed,” Joffrey sneers, and Sansa feels her blood freeze, hears the room go silent, stiff- even Brandon is silent, now. She cannot bear to look at him- Sansa feels her lower lip wobble. Her jaw aches from clenching it.

“Do not cry,” says another voice, so close that Sansa flinches even as Meryn Trant shreds her gown. She looks up and sees a woman, slim and small, looking so coldly, dignifiedly disdainful that the very room feels chillier at the sight. “Do not cry,” the woman repeats. “They are not worth your tears, Lady Stark.”

Tyrion Lannister enters and then Sandor Clegane hands her his cloak. Sansa feels the cool brush of Betha’s hands along her shoulders, the quiet grief in Naerys’ eyes, the rage in Alysanne’s- and the other woman, the strange woman, who stands beside her, unmoving as a heart tree’s trunk. She stands, and Tyrion says, quietly, “Do you want an end to this engagement?”

Alysanne snarls something, and Betha’s unembodied hair flutters through the air in her outrage, and Naerys looks away. It is the strange woman who says, glacial and magnificent in her contempt, “Do not trust him.”

Sansa keeps her back straight, her spine unbent.

“I am loyal to King Joffrey,” she says, running her tongue across the back of bloodied teeth, “my one true love.”

…

Back in her own rooms, Brandon stands vigil, and beside him stands a tall, strong-boned woman. It is only when she flips her pale braid over her shoulder and shifts, revealing the slender sword belted to her waist, that Sansa recognizes her, and stops dead in the hallway.

“Visenya,” she says.

Her maids flitter about her, anxiously. Sansa already knows them to be Lannister spies- Shaera had told her as much weeks ago- and now she ignores them, instead staring straight at the ghost she never imagined to see.

“Step inside your rooms,” says Visenya. “Dismiss your servants. We can speak after that.”

Sansa does, and once she’s closed the door behind the last of the maids, she turns, meeting Visenya’s eyes steadily.

“I heard of you,” Visenya says, quietly. “The Northerner who speaks to the dead. Who _listens_ to the dead.”

“You didn’t die in the Red Keep.”

“I did,” Visenya murmurs, eyes lighting with something that’s equal parts amusement and scorn. “But that is another story- I am here for yours. The girl who plays with men’s minds and recruits an army of the dead for herself.” She leans forwards, graceful and sinuous as a snake’s uncoiling, as a dragon’s flame. “You are helpless in the face of the Lannister boy’s rage- and you shall remain so. But you can learn to move with attacks so that the bruises are softer, and looks worse than it actually is. I can teach you.”

Sansa stands very straight, very still. “And what would you like in return?”

_No gift comes freely. Not ones this great._

“I shall teach you to wield a sword.” Visenya smiles, small and pale and deadly. “And when this is over, I shall give you one of Valyrian steel. And after that, you will go and find my sister’s bones, and you will give her the burial she deserves.”

Slowly, Sansa nods.

…

Visenya returns to standing outside the door, a stiff, immovable guard. Betha and Alysanne help Sansa tend to her back- tell her to go a little left, right, lower; brush the cloth a little harder, there’s still some wool strands caught on the blood.

When it is done, they leave. Sansa gazes outside the window and tries not to weep.

Arya is gone, and it is a good thing- but Sansa feels so _alone._ Arya is safe, but Sansa has paid the price for that in blood.

“They do not deserve your tears.”

Sansa looks up and sees the strange woman- she studies her closer, now, and identifies the tassels, the floating silk, the edges that drip to the floor as insubstantial as clouds. Her eyes are bright and intelligent, and underneath the glitter of kindness there is something that speaks of empathy.

It softens Sansa’s voice.

“No?” She asks. “They have stripped me. They can still kill me. I do not deserve to cry for that?”

“Your father is not dead,” the woman says. “Your sister is gone. Your family is safe in Winterfell. What cause is there to weep?”

“Then I am selfish,” says Sansa. “Selfish and _tired,_ and afraid, and I will weep tears of blood if I so wish. I cry for myself, and-”

“-and you are a more powerful dreamspeaker than any in the past seven thousand years. Your tears are-”

 _“Magic?”_ Sansa asks, derisive and exhausted, unknowing whom she loathes more: herself, for her failures, or the Lannisters, for placing her in such a position, or her parents, whose gifts flowed into her along with her blood.

“No more magic than the magic of a powerless woman,” says the woman, and it is gentler than Sansa might have expected. “A woman who is thrown into the deepest ocean and not only learns to float- but to swim. You are stronger than them, Lady Stark, and I will not watch another woman die in these walls soundlessly. There has been _enough_ injustice.”

For a long moment, Sansa looks at the woman. She is insubstantial, translucent; but for just a moment, she shines so bright that Sansa has to avert her eyes. For just a moment, she shines brighter than any star in the sky, as bright as the sun.

“It is an honor,” Sansa says, inclining her head and letting a small smile emerge from her lips, “to see the Princess Elia Martell.”

…

“Move _faster,”_ Visenya orders, and Sansa drops, rolls, freezes her muscles.

She aches. Both in heart and body, but body more so these days; and not wholly against her will. Visenya is a hard mistress, but she gets results. Sansa learns to roll with the Kingsguard’s blows, learns to bite the inside of her cheek and let the blood paint her lips, learns to shrink in on herself and never once cry.

“If you are ever to bear a sword, you must do better,” says Visenya.

Sansa levels a glare at her. “My brothers bore swords when they were _three,”_ she tells her. “They had none of this training.”

“They didn’t spend almost a decade and a half learning bad habits,” Visenya replies, acidic. “You have. Now: move.”

…

Elia walks beside Sansa, sometimes, when the days are particularly bad, when Sansa can scarcely move without breaking open the scabs across her back. She is a sad woman, and more than that she is an _angry_ woman, and there are few days in which she can bear to look at the daughter of one of the men who fought a battle opposing her and hers- but Sansa is an innocent, as Elia agrees, and they both strive to find common ground.

(There’s quite a lot of it.

Elia, after all, knows exactly what a highborn woman’s all-but-imprisonment is like. And after that, everything else seems- paltry.)

They speak very rarely, but the hatred in Elia’s eyes and her frigid dignity almost makes up for it.

…

Finally, one morning, Visenya wakes Sansa.

It is just before dawn, and the darkness almost makes Sansa trip over her own two feet; but Visenya floats, implacable, impatient, and takes Sansa into dark hallways under the castle. They end up in a small, airless cell.

“There’s a stone,” Visenya tells her, waving at the back of it. “Count three up from the bottom and pull, it’ll come out. You ought to find a sword inside.”

The wall is damp, and there is mold where Sansa scrabbles at the stone; the stone gives way, though, easily enough. When she places her hand inside, she meets only cold stone- and then, reaching a little further, her fingers curl over something hard, even colder.

Sansa pulls it out.

The steel is wrapped in a scabbard of stiff leather. It’s quite small, slender; when Sansa unsheathes it, it glitters brighter than anything else in the darkness.

“Dark Sister,” says Visenya, quietly. Her eyes are over-bright as they trace her old sword. “The first sword I ever held properly. My father handed it to me the night that Vhagar hatched. He told me that my first duty was to protect my brother, and then our blood, and then our people.” She exhales sharply and turns away; gestures to the door. “We ought to head back.”

Sansa stuffs the sword into the deepest part of her skirts and walks out. Back in her rooms, she is careful to hide it in the safest place she knows of. That afternoon, when she goes to the godswood, she takes it with her.

Visenya awaits her there, arms folded, back straight. She cannot provide an opponent to Sansa, but she can get Sansa to move, to shift, to learn and accept the weight of a sword in her hands.

Sansa grits her teeth, swallows, and moves through the ache of her bruises, of her scars.

…

“Traitor,” Joffrey sneers, and drags Sansa to the battlements. “That’s your septa,” he tells her. “That’s your friend, over there. Look.”

Sansa can scarcely hear him over the pounding of her heart, of her sudden fury. She bites her lip and looks away, and feels all the breath rush out of her as Meryn Trant grabs her shoulders bruisingly. Her eyes flick up to see the dead-eyed skull of her septa, the fly-ridden corpse of Jeyne Poole. Sansa cannot feel herself breathe.

_“Look at her!”_

“They weren’t traitors,” she whispers. “Not once. Not ever. Septa Mordane never once so much as called you by name.” She doesn’t look at Joffrey, doesn’t let her eyes waver from those who died in her name, those she couldn’t protect. _This is what happens when you fail. Look at them, and don’t ever forget it._ “Jeyne loved you. Why did you kill innocents?”

“You’re as stupid as Mother says,” Joffrey spits, and Sansa doesn’t flinch. “Ser Meryn-” he waves his hand.

Sansa feels the slap as if from a distance.

“I will kill him,” a voice growls, and Sansa leans on it: with her eyes closed, Brandon sounds just like her father, and she needs that strength. “One day, I will take his soul and tear him to shreds, I swear it.”

Joffrey is still _talking._ Sansa still feels sun-hot anger, but it is distant, swallowed by the pain and sting of grief. She forces herself to focus on what he’s saying.

“I’ll give you a present,” he says. “I’ll give you your father’s head as well. It shouldn’t be long before my men find him, after all.”

“Or,” Sansa says, “he’ll give me yours.”

Joffrey blinks, taken aback, and she can see the exact moment when he decides to ignore her words. He cocks his head to the side, bluntly cruel, unsubtle in his attempts to wound her. “He left you here, didn’t he? Perhaps you don’t love him very much- I’m sure a proper daughter would have cried at least a little, wouldn’t you?”

 _My father will give me your head. I will kill you with Visenya Targaryen’s sword, and bring it dripping to my family._ You _will decorate Winterfell’s walls for as long as I wish it._

“My father is a traitor,” Sansa tells him. Her voice is steadier than Joffrey will ever be with a sword. “I am not.”

Brandon’s arm is freezing next to hers, numbing her shoulder. Sansa can feel Meryn Trant’s bruising fingers, can taste the blood blotted across her lip. She keeps her gaze fierce on Joffrey.

The first of them to look away is the one with a crown.

…

Brandon avoids her, at first, and then takes to hovering about her, more protective than even Robb at his worst. Sansa can see the fruitless rage in his eyes as he bears silent witness to her beatings, to her humiliation- they don’t speak of it, ever, but he shimmers brighter in the moments that he sees Joffrey than anytime else.

…

The bruises ringing her wrists blaze with pain as Sansa whirls, twists, lifts the sword-

Visenya tells her to turn, and Sansa does, she _does-_ but she also cries out, once, sharp and high, and drops the sword. Her hands ache. Her eyes burn. She wants to curl inwards, wants to weep, but her eyes are dry as bone and her muscles are too stiff, too cold, to relax. Sansa feels as if the chill of the North has snuck inside her when she didn’t know it.

On the worst days, she even welcomes it.

“Sansa,” says Visenya. Her face is blank as ever, but her eyes are kind. Her arm, when it brushes at Sansa’s cheek, isn’t cold to make her feel as if the bone underneath will shatter. “You said you could do it today.”

“I can,” Sansa replies, but her traitorous hand won’t reach for the hilt.

“You are no good to anyone if you kill yourself,” Visenya says.

“No?” Sansa tilts her head to the side, feels dirt give way under her fingers as they claw. “I just…”

“You are tired,” says Visenya, rising to her feet. “Well, I tell you this: this life is nothing but exhausting. You will sleep on your feet, and then you will learn not to do even that. You will weep until your tears run dry, and then you will wish you had more to offer. Protectors can do nothing else.” She lifts her chin, lifts her sword, and Sansa can see the girl in Visenya’s bones for just a heartbeat, the girl who’d held a newly-hatched dragon in one hand and a sword in the other, the girl who’d loved her brother enough to conquer a kingdom beside him, the girl who’d desired power and seized it as she needed. “And, Sansa Stark, you are nothing but a protector. Do you understand?”

Sansa feels her muscles twitch. She slowly uncurls her fingers, reaches for the hilt of Dark Sister, and closes her hand about it. She is colder than the Wall, than Winterfell in the dead of winter, than death itself. She is as hot as the sun’s own fire.

“I will protect,” Sansa says, and lifts her sword, clenches her teeth and rides through the wave of pain. Visenya’s eyes gleam with satisfaction.

But for hours, one question echoes in Sansa’s mind: _Protect what?_

…

Visenya watches Sansa cut through the air, fast and deadly.

“You’ll never be perfect,” Visenya tells her. “There will always be people better than you, smarter than you- you will not ever be perfect. But you will survive, and that is what matters.”

…

Sansa keeps her head high the entire time.

People sneer, whisper behind painted lips and raised hands, mock her for her helplessness. Were she alone, Sansa doesn’t know if she could have stood against them.

But she _isn’t._

Not even when Joffrey laughs, tells her about Bran’s and Rickon’s deaths. Naerys flares white, bright as a full moon, and is the one to wrap Sansa in her arms in the godswood, the one to cry silently beside her.

Not even when Joffrey forces her to kiss a sword that leaves her lips bleeding, a sword that belongs rightfully to Sansa and her house. Shaera presses her freezing fingers to Sansa’s lips, and the stinging pain goes numb.

Not even when Cersei mocks her for her stupidity, or the courtiers laugh derisively, or the commonfolk avert their eyes. If people look closely, they can see the glow of something ethereal fanning out from Sansa’s skirts, pale and pearlescent. Even through the worst of their rage, Sansa remains coldly calm. There is nothing Joffrey can do to hurt her, and even if he does she won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing it.

The ghosts cradle her, sing to her, place a sword in her hand and only ever look at her with pride.

(Later, Sansa learns of the ghosts that wished to hurt her, the ones that she was protected from. She learns that when Visenya tried to speak to her, in the very beginning, Rickard Stark stood tall against the woman who conquered Westeros and refused her. That Aerys the Mad and Maegor the Cruel were chained and fought off by women who once held nothing to their name but silence.)

She doesn’t know that yet, however, and trusts even less. The week that Sansa wields Dark Sister well enough to silence even Visenya’s unrelenting criticism, she feels something rise in her gullet, too ugly to be a laugh, too soft to be a cry.

“You are ready,” Visenya murmurs, and Sansa smiles, plaits her hair back into a banner as bright as blood, bares her teeth too wide to call a smile, lifts a sword that shimmers like moonlight.


	2. only the brave and broken are kind in this world

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa wonders, briefly, if he knows who last smiled like this.
> 
> (Not Visenya, who smiles like a dragon. Not Rickard, whose smiles are more elusive than a wolf in the midst of winter. Not Brandon, who smiles like the cut of a broken blade.)
> 
> (It’s a smile Sansa has seen only once before, a smile she yet has carved into the curve of her heart: Elia’s smile, when she saw her brother come to King’s Landing, when she heard his bitterness against the Lannisters.
> 
> It is a terrifying smile.)

 

The Tyrells come and go, pity in their eyes as they stare at the pale red-haired girl who drifts through the Red Keep, bruises rimming her arms and face, as stern and proud as the North itself. Sansa braids the flowers Margaery offers her in the mornings, fingers as nimble as ever; during the nights, she burns them and uses the ashes to craft spells of protection around herself, around her family. **  
**

…

Sansa’s life changes slowly, in bits and pieces: the hours Visenya spends training her lessen, gradually, leaving her with time that she hadn’t realized she had.

It’s a gruesome sort of a schedule, but a schedule nevertheless- her mornings are spent dodging Cersei, praying in the godswood, practicing swords when she feels safe enough for it; her afternoons are spent at court with Joffrey’s threats and the Kingsguard’s fists; her evenings are spent embroidering and other tasks Cersei finds acceptable for Sansa to do. But before she’d trained under Visenya, Sansa’d snuck away on evenings as well as nights, and sleep had felt far less important than fighting against the Lannisters.

Now, Sansa has both sleep and knowledge. It makes the muscles along her lower back spasm sometimes, as the slow-burning desire to do  _something_  flares.

Which is why, when Visenya stands before her in the dark-lit corridor where Bloodraven had once hidden Dark Sister, Sansa doesn’t flinch away. There’s a light in Visenya’s eyes that’s frightening, but there’s a rage in Sansa’s heart that’s just as terrifying, and if she’s learned anything in all these months it’s that swords are not as intimidating as they’re made out to be, for all that they’re more dangerous.

“Did you never wonder?”

Sansa frowns up at Visenya. “Wonder?”

“I can teach you to fight,” Visenya announces. “I can teach you to be strong. But I cannot teach you to  _look_  at the world. That is something that you must decide on your own.” Her eyes narrow. “Thousands have died inside the walls of the Red Keep. Millions inside the city. And yet you don’t wonder why this city isn’t crawling with ghosts.”

“I thought most slept,” Sansa says carefully. “Like my grandfather.”

“That many? Impossible.” Visenya smiles- though it looks to be more a sneer, cold and bladed. “What have I taught you of assumptions?”

Sansa pulls herself back. “To ask before making them.”

“So  _ask,”_  she orders.

…

Foolish curiosity, perhaps, but Sansa’s always loved the old stories and Visenya’s always refused to speak of her own experiences. And what can a few harmless tales do, in the end?

Sansa learns, then.

(Visenya is many things, warrior and queen and sister; she is loved, she loved, she is loathed; she is cold, and terrible, and wrathful as the son she’d once borne.

Here is one thing she is not:  _harmless.)_

“Daenys saw the dead,” Visenya tells her, the next day. They sit in the gardens; or, Sansa sits, and Visenya stands beside her, sunlight catching on the silver planes of her hair to shimmer gold. “Daenys, and then Daenerys, and then Viserys, and then Daeron, and then Aelora, and then- Brynden.” Her lips twist, cool disdain in the arch of them. “Three women after me, and all of them fools lost in their minds. Viserys did the best he could, but- he was only one. And Brynden!”

_Brynden._

_There is no Brynden in House Targaryen. Not unless-_

“A bastard and a fool and a failure,” Visenya spits. “I ought to have slit his mother’s throat myself, I ought to have saved that blood for someone better suited for these deathful things.”

Sansa weaves the roses between her fingers. The petals are soft but the stems are hard, fibrous from being cut too late. It’s late summer. She can feel it: the air is different from only a few months previous, a bite accompanying the mornings, a tooth to the wind’s chill. Winter is coming, but few seem to know it.

“He did not do what you wished?” she asks mildly.

“He was  _strong,”_  Visenya says. “He had the blood stronger than all the rest. But he had ambition as well, ambition enough to swallow the world whole. And for that ambition was he banished by Aegon. I was close- so  _close-_  to allowing Rhaenys’ bones to sleep. I gave him Dark Sister, I gave him everything he ever wanted. Had he only gone to Dorne-” she slashes her hand down, and Sansa feels the wave of ice follow in its wake. “-but he did not, and he went to the Wall, and I had to wait for another hundred years.”

Her eyes are bright, Sansa thinks idly. Fever-bright. Star-bright.

War-bright.

“You’ve still not explained what going to sleep is,” Sansa says, dropping the rose. The thorns catch on her slippers, tear the edging of lace, but she cannot bend to lift it. There are cuts on her lower back that will open if she lets her posture soften a little. “The dead are  _dead,_  are they not?”

Visenya pauses. “They’ve not told you?”

“Who’s not told me?”

“Your uncle,” she says, flatly. “Your uncle and your grandfather. This is…” she trails off, staring at Sansa. Then she smiles, and she looks- frightening, as if a dragon were just leashed under her skin. “Unexpected.”

“Why would they have-” Sansa begins, but Visenya speaks over her.

“The Stark inheritance is not just a meaningless crown, nor a castle old enough to make dragons quail, nor a land cold and dead and hard,” says Visenya. “It is your blood, and the tales that every heir has been told, from Brandon the Builder down to your own father.” Her lip curls, faintly, and the air thrums with a chill that cracks in Sansa’s bones. “Perhaps- your father- has not been told. But that does not mean they can shirk their duties.” She straightens, proud and stern, more terrifying in one motion than Cersei could hope to be in a thousand. “You have power to make the seas shatter and the stars shake, and I am not one to hope that you will learn to tame it by  _accident._  I will not make their mistakes.”

Sansa shivers, just a little, and the pain that follows down her back makes her teeth clatter like dice in a cup.

“The dead are dead,” Visenya tells her. “They will always be that, once their life drains from them. But some do not  _rest,_  if they are angry, or if they are strong, or if they are scared- it matters little, the reason. All that matters is that moment, between life and between death, when the soul is stretched between two realms.”

She flashes her teeth, glinting points that shimmer like so many crystals, and Sansa remembers the tales she’d once read in Winterfell’s library: of men and women who’d not ridden dragons but  _become_  dragons, who’d learned to take all of a dragon’s viciousness and flame and strength inside them and master it until one couldn’t tell when they would be human and when they would be dragon and when they would be a strange, terrible mix of both.

If ever there was a woman suited for such a thing, it would be Visenya.

Visenya, who smiles a smile too fanged to be anything called reassuring, and says, “Death is painful. It is a sundering of the soul from the body. It is more painful than stripping the flesh from your bones, than burning you alive, than making a thousand cuts upon your body. It is cold, to some: the cold that goes straight to your soul, and aches worse than you can breathe. It is heat, or stabs, or something else altogether.” Gold strands spread behind her, dancing in a wind that doesn’t exist in the living world; it looks, Sansa thinks, as if they’re caught in the wind of a dragon’s wings, fierce and buffeting, rolling. “And in that moment of all-consuming pain, when our life slips from us, we must  _want,_  desperately, yearningly; we must want something more than we want the pain to end. And if you want it badly enough, you will have it.

“It is a terrible gift,” she murmurs, calming a little, enough for the pale glow surrounding her to dim, enough for Sansa to look at her without spots dimming her vision. “There are so few times that we are given what we want in life, and we are trained to hone that wanting for so many years, and the one time we are offered a chance- we take it, without knowing the consequences, and we must wait for others to release us of that which tethers us to life after.”

 _Wanting,_  Sansa thinks.  _You must want something more than you want to live, more than the pain, more than all else._

The Targaryens are- or were- known for it- for being mad, and being great, and being something the world could not quite hold in its seams. But those were the kings, who spent their lives in the sunlight and the glare of the world; not the women, who played games of twisting, moonlit webs instead, who were offered little, who were given even less.

 _You learn to want,_  Sansa thinks, her hand clenching in her lap.  _That’s what you learn, for years and years, and then you die, and you want something even then- and of course you stay._

_Of course you do._

Life is never easy, she knows, she’s learned, back under Winterfell’s steady, untrembling eaves. She’s listened to Sansa’s stories of Jonnel, and Lyarra’s stories of her mother, and Donnor’s stories of his father- she’s learned all of them, all of the older, harsher stories, all of the sharper, terrible tales.

Life is never easy, but death- Sansa’s always expected death to be simpler, somehow. Death is  _death,_  and it is terrifying, and it is inevitable, and it is beautiful, sometimes, but it is simple, too, or so she’d thought.

But maybe it isn’t.

Maybe it’s  _killing_  that’s easy, but death itself isn’t.

Sansa breathes, in and out, air in her lungs that freezes and aches.

“And the wanting,” she asks, “that’s enough?”

Visenya’s eyes narrow. “Those of Old Valyria have different rituals for when we die.  _From flame have we come, and to flame shall we return.”_  She says the last differently, as if she were reciting a song, or a catechism. “If our bones are not touched by flame, we remain. One can stay back by wanting- that is what happened with Rhaella, to hear her tell it- but the lack of flame chains us here just as much. It is why I know Rhaenys to be here still, and not beyond. And that- that is why I have stayed.”

For a long moment, Sansa cannot respond. Her muscles hurt, and she bleeds in rippling scars across her back, but there is another ache unfolding inside her, now: a kind that makes her chest quiver with a strange emotion, a kind that makes her eyes sting with tears she’s not shed in months.

“You could have left,” she says, quietly. Of course Visenya could have left- she’s met six people who could have passed her over, but she’s refused them all. She’s stayed, for centuries, helpless and aching and hurting, all for the slender hope of saving a sister a half a continent away.

“Of course,” says Visenya. “But Rhaenys remains here. Aegon has passed into peace, but she has not, and I am the eldest of us. If I do not care for them, there is none else who would, and so I will.”

 _Fierce enough to burn the world,_  thinks Sansa, lips pressed together until they’re bloodless thin.  _Not just madness, or greatness. Love, fierce enough to last through death._

“And you’re certain of it,” she murmurs. “Rhaenys- she is here. Not gone.”

“Of course,” Visenya repeats, but her eyes are sharper now, and colder. “We cared for her, both Aegon and I, since the moment she was born. Even Meraxes loved her as I’ve never seen a dragon love a human, before or after. No flame ever touched her. And none of us knew what would happen if flame did not touch us- a simple burn would have been enough- before death, but Aegon read it in one of our father’s books- they called it a  _deathless life-_  and he told it to me in passing. And I told it to Rhaenys, and Rhaenys told it to one of her lovers, and her lover betrayed her to Dorne.

“And then they fell, both of them- Meraxes and Rhaenys.” Her voice is clipped and toneless, but Sansa thinks there is a rage there, right beneath the control. It is always there, with Visenya. “And the Ullers tortured her for years. It was only- only after Nymor assumed the princedom that he sent a peace treaty. He told Aegon that he would end Rhaenys’ suffering with flame, and so ensure that she passed peacefully.”

Sansa tips her head to the side. If there is one thing clear in history, it’s that- “He took the peace.”

“He was a fool,” snarls Visenya. “I told him, I  _begged-_  but no, he took it, and the Ullers consigned her to death with poison, and Aegon had not the strength to remain here even after we knew the truth.”

“I- I don’t-” Sansa shakes her head, dislodging the rage that Visenya seems to blaze with, seems to infect everyone around her with. “Is that it, then? Flame, and you’ll pass over?”

But before Visenya can answer, another voice interrupts.

“I’ll thank you not to teach your blasphemies to my granddaughter.”

Visenya looks over Sansa’s shoulder and tosses her head as Lady had once done, right before she leapt at Grey Wind and bore him to the ground.

“Stark,” she sneers.

“Lady Targaryen,” says Rickard, and emerges out of thin air, beside Sansa’s left shoulder.

“What nonsense are you talking of now?”

Rickard moves one hand over the flat of the other, sharply, as if he were honing a blade- and light winks around his wrists for the briefest heartbeat, silver and bladed. “You have overstepped. She does not know her own histories, and she will not be taught them from a Valyrian conqueror. They are a Stark inheritance, and they are a sacred inheritance, and we shall not-”

“It is your duty, and you have neglected it,” Visenya murmurs.

She rests her hands against the smooth lines of her gown, but Sansa isn’t fooled- she knows how fast Visenya can be when she wants to be. The air had been cold with only Visenya present, but now there’s an electric tang there, one that makes her back ache and ache and ache.

“She is but a child.” Rickard flexes his shoulders, and Visenya’s face twists in disgust. “I will not have your quest for peace mar another child’s innocence, much less one of mine own blood.”

 _Another child?_  Sansa frowns.

“I am teaching her,” Visenya hisses. “She owes me two debts now, Stark, and both are heavy ones. You cannot deny that.”

Rickard remains calm, for all that Sansa can feel the blaze of power that Visenya’s wielding, for all that it must affect him even more. “I deny one debt,” he says, levelly. “You named the price of your teaching when you first met her, and knowledge imparted is not confined to one sphere alone. You cannot name a debt of death-knowledge, Lady Targaryen.” He smiles, then, and even Visenya swallows at the promise there, at the cold implacability of it. “I am not Torrhen, and I am not either of my sons, and I have told you once before: I care nothing if you wish to pass your sister on, but my protection is upon my blood and you shall not manipulate them to your ends again.”

He lifts one hand, and rests the other on Sansa’s shoulder, light and cold as the first breeze of spring after winter. “Be _gone,_  I say, for one sennight. That ought to impress upon you the strength of vows sworn.”

 _“Starks,”_  spits Visenya, looking as if she might just breathe out venom. “I told Aegon he ought to have taken your swords, but the fool didn’t listen. If he’d only taken Torrhen’s head…”

“Then you would not have Sansa, the first hope you’ve had in near a century,” says Rickard. “We are contrary creatures, we Starks, but when winter comes we are the only hope in all the world. And winter  _is_  coming, Lady Targaryen, no matter how much your dragons breathe flame.”

He bows, an incline that looks as severe as a mountain’s own silhouette, and waits. Visenya snarls again, though this time it’s soundless- and then she fades out of sight in the same manner that Rickard had appeared.

“Targaryens,” says Rickard, and it sounds amused, now, as opposed to the unyielding solemnity of before. “They have the pride to swear vows, and the temper to cross them, and the pride yet again to accept their missteps. A strange house, altogether.”

 _Strange,_  Sansa thinks, staring.  _You- you just- you just sent her away for no reason, and you don’t-_

“I don’t  _understand,”_  Sansa says, finally, voice high and piercing. “I thought I did, but there’s- there’s vows, and debts, and she’s telling me about  _death,_  and-”

“-and, there has been enough talk of this for today.” Rickard gestures for her to rise. “Lady Targaryen is impatient- she has been forced to wait for so long- but she forgets that you are a child still. There is a reason our ancestors placed safeguards, granddaughter: until you have reached adulthood, you cannot be compelled to listen. And that shall not happen for some time yet.”

Sansa clenches her fists. “I  _want_  to listen.”

“You shall,” he promises, gently. There’s a howling sadness, though, in his eyes, when he says the words. “I have been remiss to trust in Brandon’s care. I have been even more remiss in avoiding you.” Rickard pauses, and waits for just long enough that Sansa starts to rise. It makes her hiss through her teeth as the simple motion pulls at the scars of her back, but she rides through the pain instead of surrendering to it. “This is a good lesson to you: grief is a potent drug, and you shall only lose more if you lose yourself to it. It feels so very good to surrender to it, but you must fight, fight as you do against the pain, and for your pride.

“We shall speak on the morrow,” he tells her, and disappears.

No one accompanies Sansa back into the castle.

…

“I do not know the whole story,” Rickard says, when he meets with her the next day- this time, they’re in the godswood, and Sansa has a bruise over her cheekbone, reddening into a deep purple. “Do you remember the story of Rickon? The Stark who died in Dorne?”

Slowly, Sansa nods.

Rickon had died in Dorne, fighting in Daeron’s Conquest, but he’d not left his daughters, Serena and Sansa, defenseless; he’d named his own half-brothers their champions before he’d left Winterfell. He’d not expected those self-same champions to seize his daughters’ rights, however, and certainly not expected them to name themselves Lord. Serena hadn’t lived in Winterfell when she died, but her sister had.

Sansa’s named for her.

And she knows all of her stories.

“The stories were lost with him,” Rickard says. “I shall tell you as my father told me- Eddard does not know what he lost, when he lost Brandon and I in one day- and he never will.” It’s a dull shock in her belly to realize that it’s her father Rickard’s referring to. “You are lucky you can listen, Sansa, so that you can tell your brother’s children, and pass on the knowledge.”

“I still don’t know the knowledge,” she points out.

“That will come,” Rickard replies, with more patience than seems fair, particularly with the sharpness of her own tone. “First I shall tell you the sundering, and then I shall tell you the beginning, and then I shall tell you of another half-a-hundred tales I once believed false, and now know to be truth.” He leans forwards. “The year has not yet turned- we are just past two of its thirds. By the time we reach the turning, you shall know all that I know. That is as far as my protection shall carry.”

“Your protection against other ghosts,” she says, quietly. “Like Visenya.”

“I am a Stark,” he says, proudly, simply. “We do not fear death and we do not fear dying. It is our legacy. And you are a daughter of my son, blood of my blood. There are protections that I can offer you, simply because of that. But even more: I did not let Visenya meet with you until I was certain of her control- she swore a vow to me, to not kill you as she did Daeron. And so I could send her away.”

“I,” says Sansa. “I do  _not_  understand.”

He nods. “You need not know everything to understand this. All you need understand is that we are not Targaryens to search for peace in unknown lands. We are Starks, and we are descendants of Brandon the Builder, and we stay on forever. There are rituals you can do, to make it easier- Lady Targaryen spoke truly, when she said it was painful beyond imagining- but in the end it is your own will.” He doesn’t smile, not exactly, but Sansa’s seen the way her father’s face shifts when he’s satisfied with something. “And we have never lacked in that. Sense, yes, and honor, often- but not will.”

Sansa lifts her head, flattens her shoulders, imagines her bones to be as long and lithe as a wolf’s. “And when you lack that will?” she demands. “When you must do something you dislike, as you are doing now.”

 _What then, grandfather? Do not think that your reluctance has gone unnoticed. You hate this, but you are still doing it. And you are not doing it_  properly,  _either._

Rickard looks at her- just looks- and that’s enough to silence Sansa. He looks like Lyarra, a little, and like her father too, but more than anyone else he looks like Brandon Snow, Torrhen’s bastard brother. He looks sad, and angry, and sad that he’s angry.

“It is my duty,” he says. “I ought to have protected my family better. My ambitions and my loves outweighed the duties Brandon gave us, and I let both Stark lord and heir die together, for the sake of a vengeance I have not yet found. And you are too young for this, far too young, but there are ghosts waiting to teach you falsehoods, and there are whispers of terrible things from the North, and I am afraid you have not the time to learn slowly.”

“The duties,” Sansa says, as a question.

A smile, small and bright as a flash of moonlight on waves, darts across Rickard’s face. “That is the beginning.” His voice deepens, shifting into the same cadence with which Visenya had spoken the day before. “We shall begin with the sundering, which was Rickon, Rickon son of Cregan- who died in Dorne and would have let the hopes of the world die with him had he not loved his sister so dearly.

“He told her the truth of our heritage, though not the whole of it, and so when he died she could preserve it- she was also a speaker, and so knew the truth- away from Jonnel, and away from Edric, but alive for the next of the Stark line. From Sarra it passed to Serena, and from Serena to Arrana when she had the gift of the sight; from Arrana to Arsa, who bore the burden of telling it to her brother Beron when he showed his gift; from Beron to Donnor, eldest and dearest child of Beron; from Donnor to Willam when he lost his breath of a wasting sickness; from Willam to Rodrik, when they were captured at Long Lake and Artos negotiated the release of one of them; from Rodrik to Edwyle, who took up the Lordship of his father; from Edwyle to Rickard, who did not believe in the tales; and from Rickard to you, dearest: across death and across generations.”

He reaches out, and catches her hand. Her palm blazes with the cold of it, but Sansa holds still, keeps her eyes fixed to Rickard’s.

“Eight thousand years,” he says, with the inexorable weight of the ending of a story, “this tale has been carried, from one Stark to another. We have lost pieces, and added pieces, but we are the hopebringers and the dreamspeakers and the wolfsingers, and we shall not falter, not through war, not through death, not through the greatest pain, not through the oldest hurts.”

He shudders to a halt, and reaches out to brush against her wrist.

Then he fades.

…

The next day, he tells her of Brandon the Builder, who had founded their house, and of Brandon the Breaker, who had defeated the Night’s King all those millennia ago.

The day after that, he tells her of the wolfsingers, people who could become wolves when they wished it, people who sang songs in their wolf form of such ferocious beauty the Starks had managed to conquer the Vale and half of Essos before being turned back.

The day after that, he tells her of the history of the title hopebringer, for when all of Westeros faltered in the winter, when both wildlings and Northmen were on the verge of dying in snows higher than mountains and colder than death, it was the Starks who stepped forwards, and the Starks who fought it back, and the Starks who slayed the Night’s King when all the rest could not.

He’s already taught her dreamspeaking, but not of Cregard’s penchant for making his enemies scream the night before a battle, nor Jocelyn’s iron ambition that had ensured highborn marriages for all three of her daughters by twisting their desired husbands to the same cause.

(“But it’s  _wrong,”_  Sansa says, when he tells her of how Cregard had made Dagon Greyjoy scream for a fortnight before Beron truly confronted him. Rickard flickers when he sees the horror on her face, in and out of sight, before he says, fiercely, “Dagon would have slit half the North’s throats in their sleep if he thought he’d get away with it. In battle- you do not let honor dictate your motions. It might be wrong, or it might be right; what matters is the tools, and whether you use them.”

He says, “It is the truth. Shall you turn from it?”

 _Yes,_  thinks Sansa.)

She folds her hands over one another, parchment pale, and bears through it, breathes through it, through the instinctive horror and the twisting pain. She is a Stark yet, and the first princess of the North in more than three centuries, and she has survived both swords and words sharper than swords.

Sansa will survive this too.

…

Visenya approaches Sansa a sennight later, when Rickard’s order ends, but Rickard transposes himself between them before she can speak.

“I am not Torrhen,” he says warningly, and Sansa remembers what he’d said before, in the gardens-  _I am not Torrhen, and I am not my sons._  She wonders what the words mean. “Do not forget that, Lady Targaryen.”

“I could never,” she says, baring her teeth. “Now move, you old fool. I must speak to the girl. I am her tutor yet, and there are things I must teach her that you have no right to hear.”

Again, Rickard bows, but this time he’s the one to fade from view. Visenya spends the rest of the afternoon training her on the way of swords, of turning and twisting and dancing to the music of steel and death.

…

It’s at the year’s turning that Joffrey strikes her.

It’s the first time that he does it himself- it’s fast, two slaps that sting more than hurt, that surprise more than ache- but Elia appears at it, and she makes a noise that hurts Sansa’s throat to think of, all high and scornful.

“When we wed,” he says, wrenching her chin up to meet his mad green gaze, “you will scream. I will present your brother’s head and your father’s head and Winterfell’s cornerstone at the feast, and you will drink wine made from your  _bitch_  mother’s blood, and you will thank me for putting a crown on your head.”

For months now, Sansa’s been silent.

She wonders if anyone has noticed it, but she’s quite certain that nobody has. The ghosts whom she’d once been close to had stopped spending so much time with her after Visenya started teaching her swords, and both Rickard and Visenya- the ghosts she spends most of her time with- are too lost in their own minds to pay much attention to how quiet she’s been. Brandon’s the one who might have realized, but he’s been sulking off in a corner after Rickard shouted at him.

But Sansa’s been quietly shifting her mind for months now, learning movements from Visenya that would kill a man without much more than the scrape of a nail, learning truths from her grandfather that would leave Joffrey’s mind broken more cleanly than the Mountain crushing it- she’s changed, and she feels something flare up within her to match that change, through the cracks of her mind where she’s grown up.

She has a mountain’s steadiness in her. But she also has a wolf’s ability to smell when tides are turning, when duty calls her elsewhere, and Sansa lifts her lips to smile at Joffrey.

Sansa wonders, briefly, if he knows who last smiled like this.

(Not Visenya, who smiles like a dragon. Not Rickard, whose smiles are more elusive than a wolf in the midst of winter. Not Brandon, who smiles like the cut of a broken blade.)

(It’s a smile Sansa has seen only once before, a smile she yet has carved into the curve of her heart: Elia’s smile, when she saw her brother come to King’s Landing, when she heard his bitterness against the Lannisters.

It is a terrifying smile.)

It doesn’t matter. Joffrey will know of her rage, and he will fear her soon, but the time for that has not yet come.

“Yes,” she says, because she is a girl who can be hurt.

Within, she says, in a swirl of cold that echoes of a vow:  _I am a Stark. I am a princess. And when my brother comes to King’s Landing, he will take your head, and my father shall take the Kingslayer’s head, and I will drink of your mother’s blood and then- and_ then, _my vengeance shall be satisfied._

Septa Mordane’s head is a husk, now, little more than a skull. Jeyne’s has more hair stuck to it, but there’s nothing of the girl that had once sat beside her and loved her. Sansa stares at them when Joffrey brings her up here, and every single time she has thought of her grief and her fruitless rage.

Rickard’s protection would last her until the turn of the year. A fortnight to plot, and plan, and fight her way out- it’s not enough, but it will have to be. Sansa’s been making do with cobbled-together hopes and hastily-considered plans for a long time now, and she has little hope her escape will be any better.

She tilts her head back, eyes affixed to her first friend and oldest mentor. If she’d been born before Aegon’s conquest, Sansa would have bowed and called Septa Mordane her second mother- but her Septa would have hated to be remembered in such a manner anyhow, so she only nods and whispers, “Goodbye.”

Joffrey, as always, doesn’t hear.

Elia, beside her, does. There’s a longdrawn inhale, like a choked-off cry. Sansa waits for her to speak but Elia doesn’t. There’s only silence, and then she winks out of sight.

It doesn’t matter. Sansa has done what she has to, and when she leaves she will not leave regrets behind her to fester.

 _Goodbye._  Her footsteps echo in the red-stone hallways.  _Goodbye. Goodbye._

Sansa will not leave  _anything_  of herself behind.

…

That night, for the first time in months, Betha appears to her.

“You shall leave soon,” she says carefully.

Sansa nods. “My grandfather’s protection shall fade at the turn of the year. I’ve learned all that I can, and I’ve spent long enough here, I think.”

More than a year and a half. Sansa wonders if anyone has ever ached as much as she has, in these past months; the pain has sunk into the weave of her skin, right up until she cannot imagine life without it.

“Not only your grandfather’s protection,” Betha replies softly. “Ours as well.”

“Yours.” Sansa frowns. “I don’t understand.”

“Rickard Stark bound Visenya Targaryen in chains borne of blood and debt,” Betha murmurs, before she lets one hand lift up, slowly, as if she were unzipping the fabric of the world. “But they are not the only cages possible, and they are not half so powerful as chains of blood thrown by blood.” She smiles, almost confiding, but there’s a nasty edge to it that makes Sansa’s want to flinch. “Naerys rather enjoyed hearing Aegon’s screams.”

Sansa can feel herself pale. “He hasn’t passed on?”

“Not him, nor Aerys, nor Maegor. It takes a strong soul to stay on, Lady Stark- strength that comes from pain, or madness.” Betha smiles again. This time, the very air chills at the bitterness in it. “The Targaryens have always had overmuch of both.”

“I thought myself safe,” Sansa replies faintly. “I thought myself safe.”

“And so you are,” says Betha, briskly. “For another fortnight. Our chains are strong, but they shall last for the period of a year alone. When it shifts from old to new, so too do the bindings, and if any of them evade us then, they shall likely attempt to hunt you down.” She reaches forwards and cups Sansa’s cheek, frozen fingers blazing pain down her neck. “We cannot allow it.”

“So you wish me to leave?”

“I wish you to be safe,” Betha says. “It matters little how.”

…

Naerys comes to her next, and Alysanne is supposed to come to Sansa after, but it’s no woman who appears to her on the third night.

It’s Brandon, instead, and it’s a Brandon with a set to his face that leaves Sansa wary.

“I shall have to be quick,” is what he tells her, before anything else. Sansa straightens further, painfully stiff. “We have little time before we’ll be identified. If we’re found-”

Even as he speaks, Sansa sees a faint silver curtain float away from his body. It creeps forwards until it envelops her, filmy and insubstantial. Sansa’s experienced many types of cold in her life; the cold of winter, the chill of ghosts, but never before the emptiness of death. The cold that it slices into her muscles is worse than anything she has ever known before.

“-it won’t be good,” Brandon finishes, before he notices her wincing. “I will leave it soon enough. This takes far too much energy for me to maintain the shield for overlong. But this assures privacy in a manner that none other can.”

She tilts her head to the side, watching him. “Why?”

Brandon, bless him, understands immediately.

“Because Father believes you a child,” he says, voice low and fast. “I would not have interfered, but there are rumors from the North of- eldritch things. Terrible things. Our blood has defended the realms of mankind for millennia, and we cannot falter now, not for all that you are a child.” His face twists. “Sansa, I am very sorry for this. But there is no room for pity, or compassion, or whatever- whatever my father believes, here. You must go North.”

 _So my grandfather is still hiding things from me._  She shakes her head, lets the irritation drop away from her as water off a dragonflower’s leaves.  _I will have to look, and see, and take note of even more, then._

“I don’t want your pity,” Sansa retorts sharply. “I want to understand. But even if I  _did_ understand what you want- and I don’t, not at all- I can’t listen to you. I’ve promised Visenya to burn Rhaenys, and Rhaenys is in Dorne.”

“Yes,” says Brandon, “but you must know where she is, first.”

“She’s in Dorne,” Sansa repeats slowly, exaggerating the syllables.

“Where in Dorne?” Brandon demands. “Hellholt? Sunspear? Is she lost in one of the half-a-hundred deserts the fuckers live in? You’ll never find her if she is. No.” He leans forwards, places his palms on his knees and swings close to her face up until her eyes sting from the sheer pain. “What you must do is find the last person who found her.”

And in that moment, Sansa sees it: the plan, unfolded in front of her, gleaming as a sword the heartbeat before battle. Brandon’s always been brasher than he’s smart, but that’s saying little; he’s bolder than most any other man Sansa’s seen. And when he puts his mind to it…

“Oh,” she says.

“You go North.” Brandon smiles, feral and triumphant. “You fight whatever is worrying the ghosts of Winterfell. And then you speak to Bloodraven, find out where the Targaryen’s bones are buried, and burn the ashes to dust. Your debts will be paid thrice over, and none shall ever speak against it.”

 _“Oh,”_  she says, again, but this time the surprise is tempered with disquiet. “The ghosts are worried?”

Brandon tips his head forwards. “Terrified might be a better term. They’re not saying why, though, and that’s even worse.” He taps his lips. “Means it’s a Stark secret, and gods only know how dangerous it’ll be. Mother hasn’t sent a message in almost half a year.”

Sansa stills.  _If Lyarra is afraid…_  “She sends them more often than that?”  

“Once a month,” he affirms. “For more than ten years, now. It’s how I counted time before-” Brandon shakes his head. “Before.”

“We certainly tend to attract dangerous secrets,” Sansa murmurs, smiling weakly.

“The cold,” Brandon replies, but doesn’t smile. Of all Rickard’s children, Brandon looks the most like Lyarra; he has her flatter features, as opposed to Rickard’s hatchet-like face. But in that moment, he looks the same as Rickard had, in facing against Visenya. Stern and terrifying, made of an old, proud wrath. “Death. It is coming for us all. Father has still not told you the truth of our burials, has he?”

“No,” Sansa says, but before she can say anything more Brandon drops the silver veil. Heat rushes back to her, painful in its suddenness, and Sansa bites back the reflexive urge to hiss. Brandon’s face is shadowed with sympathy, but there’s a grim undertone to it that’s more eloquent than any of his words could be: he’s frightened, and Sansa feels her own stomach tighten to match.

A moment later, he fades out of view, and Alysanne enters.

She doesn’t speak to Brandon alone after that.

……

Sansa doesn’t tell anyone else what she knows, either.

…

Four days later, she breaks enough to ask Rickard what the Starks’ death rituals consist of.

“Brandon,” Rickard says, instead of answering. His face darkens rapidly, as if thunderstorms were scuttling across the bridge of his nose.

“No,” replies Sansa. “Only- the Targaryens burned their dead, and they all seem to  _want_  to go beyond. But every Stark who died with the death rituals has remained here, and none seem ready or willing to go either.” She tilts her head up and looks at Rickard, steadily, calmly. “Why?”

“You are too young-”

“I’m old enough,” she snaps. “I’m old  _enough,_  Grandfather. Rodrik the Crusader led his men at the age of thirteen, and none spoke against him despite his youth. I am only a year younger, and I am not asking to lead armies- only for information! What is so dangerous in words?”

_What is so harmful in tales?_

Her own thoughts come back to her, and Sansa represses them with a shudder. Visenya might have spurred her grandfather to teach her, but there has still been nothing truly dangerous in what she’s been told.

“You ought have been older,” Rickard says wearily. “This burden is too terrible.”

“But I am not.” Sansa remembers the way her mother had once set her jaw, when her father wished to go out riding in the middle of a snowstorm; Catelyn had set her jaw and given Ned a  _look,_  and that was all it took for all of Winterfell to know that no such ride would take place. She does her best to emulate that tilt of the head, that mocking smile, now. “I am not, but I am enough. And you will have to tell me anyhow.”

Rickard pauses. Then he says, in the same practiced rhythm of a memorized tale: “Brandon the Breaker defeated the Night’s King, all those millennia ago. The Night’s King, whose Queen was of the Others- it was a bitter battle, and at the last Brandon slew him. It was too late, however. When he returned to Winterfell, it was to a slaughter: of daughters and sons and wives and husbands, all by the Night’s Queen’s hand. He killed her after he cut up the corpses of his sons she sent after him.” His eyes shadow. “She cursed him, Sansa, before he killed her. For slaying blood of his blood, she cursed him with a prophecy: that the Others would rise again, and the Night’s King with them, and all Brandon had lost would be in vain. So he answered by using her power and binding his line as close to death as the living can walk. When he died, he became the first ghost in the North.”

“She cursed him,” Sansa says, quietly. “For what?” Because she heard, but  _no,_  it can’t be true-

“For slaying blood of his blood.” Rickard smiles, sweet and bitter. Sansa thinks she knows, now; or Brandon slew his sons and daughters, his own blood. But Rickard isn’t finished; he continues: “For the Night’s King was Brandon’s brother, trueborn and of his own heart.”

_No._

Sansa imagines it: seeing Robb at the other end of Dark Sister, pale and blue-veined, hollowed. She imagines driving that sword forwards, and she sees the pain that erupts in Robb’s eyes, feels the horror that erupts in her own stomach.

And then Brandon returned to Winterfell to see it broken, blood running down to the White Knife in a river, and he faced the specters of his sons, his daughters-

“That’s why it’s called Winterfell,” she says, abruptly assured of it.

“Yes,” says Rickard. “For winter fell at Winterfell, and the man who let it fall was thereby named its King. We have been called Kings of Winter ever since.”

“If Brandon was the first ghost-”

“-most other ghosts are his descendants.” Rickard smiles, barely. “The Targaryens come by the ability separately, yes, but the ghosts that remain without Targaryen blood have some measure of Stark-blood in their veins. Either that, or a will to overcome a pain more overwhelming than any you can imagine. They might not be direct descendants, but- enough. By spirit, at the least.”

Sansa leans back. “That’s not what Visenya told me.”

“Lady Targaryen knows far fewer secrets than she believes herself possessing,” Rickard says quietly. “And knows even less what she pretends. Stark secrets shall remain secrets, granddaughter, never fear.”

“There are so many ghosts,” she says, then, remembering: silver flashes have lit up her eyes for so long, the corners of her vision shimmering strands of gossamer; Sansa can only imagine how many people she has met, how many people of Brandon Breaker’s line she has met over her scant years.

“Eight millennia is a long time,” he replies. “The Targaryens have not been here for even a half of a tenth of that time, and they’ve wreaked havoc on the continent. Imagine- eight  _thousand_  years.” The smile fades. “But that is not why I hesitated to tell you, Sansa. There have been whispers from the North of terrible things. The usual channels of information are hesitating, and those ghosts who are communicating are speaking less- as if there were little to say, or they were afraid to say it.

“There is only one reason for it. Can you think of one?”

 _What would the dead fear?_  Sansa frowns into the distance.  _Why would the dead be silent? Brandon said it would be a Stark secret. If Brandon Breaker did bind us so close to death, then…_

“I can’t be right.”

“Say it,” Rickard orders.

“I can _not_  be right,” Sansa repeats. “It’s impossible. It-”

“The dead are afraid,” says Rickard. “Lyarra has not spoken to me in months, and there has not been a Stark in Winterfell for just as long. The dead are terrified, and Winterfell has scarcely spoken more than a few words on this subject. If you hide behind your fears and call them impossible, all your training shall have been for naught.”

_I can be brave, yes. As my grandmother before me, and my namesake before her. I will be brave._

“Someone is reanimating the dead,” Sansa says flatly.

Rickard inclines his head.

“The Others are reanimating the dead.”

“Yes.”

_“Why?”_

“The question is how,” he says. “And how to stop them. There is one last tale I have not told you, Sansa, and then you shall know all that I do of our stories- all that is worth knowing, anyhow.”

“Tell me,” she demands.

Slowly, Rickard shakes his head. “This is a tale that another shall tell you. It is not my place. But when you reach Winterfell, tell Lyarra that you’ve heard all the tales but one- she shall know what to do.” He reaches out and brushes a hand over her face, gentle for all its pain. “You look so much like my daughter, for all that you are so different. May the gods guide you well, when you leave.”

“Who said that I was-”

“-the ghosts have known of your decision to leave since you told Elia,” Rickard says, the same faint smile on his face.

“I didn’t know Elia spoke so much with others.”

“She doesn’t. But this was more important than her resentments.”

Sansa juts her jaw out. “If Lyarra is afraid, then it is something to be afraid of. I must go North.”

“You must go south,” Rickard says evenly. He flickers, slightly, in and out of view.

“First the North,” she says. “To see my home, and my-”

“-and your oaths?”

She hesitates for all of a breath. Rickard’s mouth purses. Even as she opens her mouth to speak, Sansa feels the temperature drop, so quickly her blood feels as if it might crack in her veins. When she turns around, she sees Visenya.

A Visenya blazing brighter than all the stars in the night sky, causing frost to creep down the room’s walls from her sheer wrath. Had it been any colder- had Sansa been in the North; had winter been any stronger; had the sun been any lower- she’d likely have frozen alive before any action could be taken. As it is, there’s just enough warmth for her to bear through the initial pain and slip to her knees, teeth chattering wildly.

“Traitor,” snarls Visenya. “Oathbreaker, I name you, Sansa of House Stark. Oathbreaker and traitor and fool, all in one. Did you think you could rescind your oaths to me and live through the consequences? I will have your head for this.” She starts forwards. “And when you die, I will spend the rest of eternity shredding your soul to tatters.”

She swoops down, and Sansa rolls away, face turning towards the window just in time to feel a warm breeze enter. It feels like a slap across her face, turning all her bones brittle; warmth warring against the unnatural drop in temperature. She coughs, and feels the slickness of blood across the back of her throat.

Sansa speaks through it.

“If you kill me, you condemn Rhaenys.”

“I do not  _care,”_  Visenya spits. “I have waited almost three centuries; what is another? I shall wait for another, and they shall come. I have an eternity to wait!”

“An eternity of suffering for your sister, and an eternity indeed: for the dead come, and the Others with them, and there is little you can do for it at all.” Sansa twists her neck and spits on the floor, blood bright against the red stone. She remembers an old saying, one that Torrhen’s eldest son had been very fond of:  _Aegon built a castle of blood on the site of his triumphs._  Her palms ache.

“I am not your tame pet,” Visenya whispers, seemingly so far beyond rage her voice cannot get louder. “I am not a person to let you walk away from broken vows. I am the first queen of these realms, and the strongest of them all, and the cruelest.” She bares her teeth. “And you, little girl, are soon going to be dead.”

 _Gods above,_  Sansa thinks, scrabbling backwards- she cries out, and falls, when Visenya slashes her hands down, but the expected wave of cold doesn’t come.

Had it touched her, Sansa’s sure she would have died from the inside out. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does: her blood would have cracked in her veins and turned to blocks of ice; her heart would have burst from the water’s expansion; her muscles would have torn apart in a singular moment of  _pain-_

But it doesn’t happen.

Rickard flashes between them, and he absorbs the cold that Visenya sent at her without even flinching. He straightens, instead, and says in a voice that rolls around them like thunder: “I have warned you twice now, and this is the third, Lady Targaryen. You have overstepped your duties, and your rights.”

 _“She_  overstepped,” Visenya cries. “It is your granddaughter who has broken her vows, Stark, not I! And you heard it with your own ears: she said it, promised to go North instead of south, stated a desire to see her blood before she ever saw her oaths through. You tried to convince her otherwise, and now-”

“-and I have not heard her finish,” he says, level as he’d been with Sansa. “If I thought her an oathbreaker, then I would not have stepped in.”

Sansa stares at him, horrified. Her grandfather needs her to convince him, and the only possible reason she might have to go North instead of south has been given to her by a person who does not deserve to be revealed in such a manner. But between Brandon’s desire for secrecy and her own desire for survival, Sansa knows well which she’ll choose.

“I swore to save her,” she croaks. “But she might be anywhere in Dorne, and I cannot spend overlong searching for her. So I must find the person who saw her last.” Sansa slowly, achingly, draws herself up. She doesn’t once look at her grandfather, not even when he frowns thunderously. “Brynden Waters, if you were wondering. And then I shall search for Rhaenys in all the deserts you wish of me.”

She turns and leaves slowly.

...

Neither of them curse her, but she half-expects them to do so- curse her in the back with waves of ice that tear her apart. Perhaps for all of Joffrey’s attempts, he’ll find her a red-ribboned corpse within her own chambers, slain by Westeros’ first queen and Sansa’s own grandfather, both of whom have been dead for decades.

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens, but Sansa only relaxes when she is in the sunlight. Her teeth still feel cold, and she shudders at it.

 _I will return, Lyarra._  She stares into the sun and does not blink.  _I swore that to you before I ever swore anything else, and I shall hold to it._

_I will return._

…

“I am not Torrhen,” Rickard says, days later, and it sounds like an apology.

Sansa’s throat is rawer than she’s ever screamed in front of Joffrey, and her hair feels like a weight along her spine.

“It took Visenya all of a breath to decide that I’d broken my vows,” she says softly. Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees him stiffen. “Either someone alerted her to what was going on in the room, or she has been following me all this time.” For the first time in two days, she looks at her grandfather. Her voice is mocking when she quotes his words back at him: “Stark secrets shall remain secrets, granddaughter, never  _fear.”_

 _You either told her yourself that I was going to break my vows, or you let her follow me without my knowledge._  But Rickard would not have given away Stark secrets, not the kind that came through the lineage. Sansa knows which one will leave her heart in fewer pieces, but she also knows that she cannot flinch from the truth.  _You must have told her, when you touched me- you looked so soft, then._

_Liar._

“I am not Torrhen,” says Rickard, again. “I am not my sons. I am a hard man, Lady Stark, and-”

“-and I am your granddaughter,” Sansa hisses, fury surging up her throat, rawer than any blood. “You might not be Torrhen, but at least Torrhen knew when to kneel. Knew when lives were worth more than honor. And at least your sons know what it is to love, for I am certain you’ve forgotten all traces of it.” She turns to the window, lets the breeze warm her face as she’d done when she laid on the floor helpless.

When Rickard stood by silently.

“You disgust me,” she finishes, and it tolls in her soul as a ringing bell.

_Oh, Lyarra, I am sorry for this. But your husband is not a good man, and I cannot forgive him for choosing his honor over my life, when he knew himself to be all the family I had within a hundred miles of this city._

_I am sorry, but I cannot forget this._

When she looks away from the sunlight, the spots are so bright in her vision that she cannot see whether ghosts are present or not. There is silence around her, and the sun feels very warm along her skin. It takes her a moment, and then Sansa realizes- Rickard’s left. This is likely the first time that she has been alone all her life, without any ghosts around her. This is how the truly living feel, every moment of their lives.

Sobs do not shudder through her shoulders, and there are no tears in her eyes, but she sinks to her knees anyhow. There is only silence around her: long and unfettered and terrible for it.

Her palms ache, as they’ve done since Joffrey struck her.

Her palms ache, but they do not shake at all.

…

She says goodbye to the ghosts she has met, over the months. There are more than she thought there would be: enough to make her wonder when she met them all. It is not so long a farewell as in Winterfell, but there are fewer ghosts in the Red Keep, and Sansa has not been so friendly either.

There are two ghosts she does not speak to, however, and Sansa has no intention of going to look for them either. Visenya and Rickard are far too capable of turning her words back on herself, of twisting her up until she’s uncertain of everything she’s ever done all her life.

Sansa’d decided to not go looking for them, but if there’s one thing that Visenya is incapable of, it’s taking a hint when she’s set her mind on something.

The night that Sansa plans to leave, she flickers into view, and Brandon- who hasn’t left Sansa’s side for almost a full sennight- growls low in his throat at the sight.

“You’ve some nerve showing your face here,” he says.

“I’ve more  _nerve_  in one finger than you’ve muscle, boy,” Visenya sneers back, before lifting a brow. “Though- that’s not saying much, I suppose.”

Brandon snarls low in his throat, but before he can answer, Sansa steps forwards.

“Why are you here?” she asks evenly.

Visenya keeps the eyebrow arched. “Has no one ever told you that leaving your tutor without any notice is the height of rudeness? I came to rectify the situation, as soon as it was confirmed to me.”

_Which means that she didn’t know at all, and the other ghosts only told her recently._

“You have no right,” Brandon begins, but Sansa cuts him off again.

“There was one thing that I was wondering about.”

“Speak, then.”

Sansa’s palms feel damp; she wipes the sweat against the inside of her sleeves. “When Daeron died, he died without finding Rhaenys. According to you- he searched in Hellholt, and it was on his way to Skyreach that he was killed.”

Visenya inclines her head.

“Did you mourn him?”

“He died a great man,” Visenya replies. “He died a better death than any I could have offered him, in pursuit of a goal he came closer to than any other king in all of my dynasty. Of course I did not mourn him.”

 _I will not have your quest for peace mar another child’s innocence,_ Rickard had said, all those months previous. Sansa hadn’t known then, hadn’t known until now, how true Rickard’s fears had been. Had Sansa been more biddable, she’d likely be on her way to Dorne by now; she’d likely be half dead under the Dornish desert sun, and no one would be the wiser for it.

“He was eight and ten when he died,” Sansa murmurs. “Far too young.”

“Old enough.”

_To die? To know his enemies so clearly? I think not. Not unless you told him those truths, whispered them in his ear until you had him more pliant than any cow raised for the slaughter._

“So,” is all she says, lip curling just slightly: “You fed his hatred.”

“I ensured he knew his enemies.”

“He  _died,”_  Sansa bites out.

“Yes,” says Visenya, eyes wide and flat as pools of still water. “He died, as we all do. He died trying to do what he felt was right, and was good. It was a noble death.”

_She swore a vow to me to not kill you as she did Daeron._

_I trusted you,_ Sansa thinks, and curls her nails into her palms, straightens with all the fluid grace that Visenya has drilled into her over their practices. She feels Brandon hunch downwards, just a little, behind her left shoulder, and it feels like a second shield, a living protector, a net to fall back on.  _I trusted you once, but no longer._

“You killed him,” she says, and for all that she whispers, it is an accusation that hurts her throat from the fierceness of her delivery. “You told him whom to hate, and how to hate, and then you set him free. And if he’d truly burned Rhaenys- you wouldn’t have wept, would you? You wouldn’t have cared at all.”

It’s a secret that Alysanne had given her, one that she remembers from a childhood spent with her mother. Visenya had always hated many people, but the rage she’d set aside for Alyssa Velaryon was remarkable in its intensity. Alyssa had always returned it, and she’d won the best of their bitter rivalry in Visenya’s death: it was Alyssa’s line on the Iron Throne now, not Visenya’s.

And every day of her life, Alyssa had called Visenya a heartless shrew.

One of Visenya’s oldest wounds, but one of the most effective nevertheless. Sansa faces Visenya and bites her tongue before she rubs more salt in an already-stinging wound.

“You little  _bitch,”_  Visenya whispers. “I am your-”

“-you are nothing to me,” Sansa says, quietly. “I shall pay the debt you have named for knowledge rendered, but nothing more. When Rhaenys’ bones burn, there shall be nothing between us.”

Visenya’s mouth opens in a gaping maw, rage flickering over her face. But Sansa’s ready for this, has  _been_ ready for this, ever since Visenya covered a room in frost and left her on her knees for nothing but her rage. Even as Visenya swoops forwards, Brandon dodges in front of Sansa. They flicker in and out of sight, but Brandon’s not strong enough to hold her back properly. 

It little matters. Sansa reaches for the cloth she’s braided over the past few weeks, made of the flowers she’d requested of Margaery. It’s clumsily made, but it will do the job.

 _Bonds of blood are the strongest, but there are other kinds. And_ you  _bound yourself to me when you named yourself my tutor._ _These aren’t bonds of blood, Visenya. These are bonds of unforgiveness and unexpected betrayal._

Soaked in her tears and the melted frost of Visenya’s temper, bound with the cloth that had once been wrapped around Dark Sister, made of rosemary flowers for remembrance. The physical aspect won’t affect Visenya, but the rage it was made with will surely burn her. 

Just before she readies herself to throw it, Rickard appears beside her.

“That will not work,” he says conversationally. 

“It will,” Sansa replies, before she lashes out; where it touches Visenya, the silvery edges darken, turning almost opaque where they’d once been translucent. Visenya throws her head back to howl, twisting to glare at Sansa, before she fades entirely out of view, taking Brandon with her.

“Those must have been well-made,” Rickard murmurs. “To hurt a ghost so strong as Visenya- strong indeed.” He frowns. “Not that it shall do you much good. You shall not be able to trap her half so easily, now that she knows what to expect.”

Sansa shoulders her pack and tightens the crude scabbard she’s tied around her waist. “It doesn’t need to," she says firmly. “It only needs to keep her away from me for tonight. By morning I shall be far from here, and Visenya’s power shall be faded.”

Rickard pauses. “You used rosemary for this. But you asked the Lady Tyrell for both rosemary and-”

“Lilies.” Sansa smiles blandly back at Rickard. “Sword lilies.”

He pales, staring at her, when Sansa pulls a thin slink of brilliant red flower. Sword lily meant strength of character and honor, and paired with the blood she’d coughed up from when Rickard had refused to protect her, bound with cloth the grey and white of their house, it’s all but an accusation of familial infidelity.

“Then I believe it is time for you to leave, granddaughter,” he tells her, and smiles, sadly. His eyes flick away, and then back to her. “If you can find it in yourself- tell your grandmother that I miss her, very much.” He hesitates, briefly, before continuing, “And that she has raised a wonderful granddaughter, with enough iron in her spine to forge a half-hand sword.”

Then Rickard starts to move towards where Visenya disappeared, but doesn’t stop speaking. “And worry not of Visenya. She shall not trouble you any longer, that much I swear to you.”

Then he disappears, and Sansa doesn’t pause to see the end of it; she turns and flees, slippers slapping against the stone floor.

…

When Sansa leaves King’s Landing, she leaves behind this: a doll of straw and wool, fitted for smaller hands than hers have been for near a decade; a cloak of white offered to her by a fire-scarred man, the bloodstains washed fastidiously away and hemmed with near-invisible stitches in a pattern that suggests a wolf’s teeth; and a braid, thick and red and tossed in a roaring flame before anyone could see it.

…

There are old sewage drains, leading out into the sea. According to Alysanne, they began as a method for emptying the castle’s waste out of the city, but the impact the drains had on fishing quickly stopped their usage. They’re small drains, all of them, but Sansa’s just slim enough to fit through the larger ones, and once she’s outside she can trace the shoreline until she reaches the Kingswood.

Sansa shoves her palms outward at the grate covering the exit. The metal grate is rusted almost fully-through and bends for the first two shoves, but it breaks across the middle after that. The pieces clatter down the hillside, a little louder than Sansa had thought they’d be.

It’s the turn of the year, though.

Anyone on guard will be drunk by now, and anyone who isn’t knows that this night is for eldritch things. Ghosts can break free of their bonds, or monsters of moonlight and stone can appear out of thin air, or tears in reality can become abruptly wider, more visible. One ragged-haired urchin will not draw anyone’s attention.

She pauses, though, before she drops onto the beach- Sansa’s never been alone before, and now the ghosts she thought would walk beside her for a few hours at least are caught up keeping more terrible ghosts from catching her. When she flees the city, Sansa flees all alone. It’s more difficult than she’d ever considered.

Except- even as she pulls herself out of the drain, even as she finds some purchase on the soft hills- Elia appears before her.

Elia, who looks weary, and triumphant, and dangerous, all at once. Sansa’s seen even less of her over the past few weeks, as Elia’s been trailing her brother around the city, but there’s a solidity to her now that Sansa’s not seen in any ghost save Visenya at her angriest.

“Princess Stark,” she says, quietly, hovering over the open air. “You are leaving, now.”

“Yes.”

“You are afraid.”

Sansa breathes in slowly. “Yes.”

“You have no cause for it,” says Elia firmly. “You are a girl after my own heart, Sansa of House Stark: a girl whom the world hates, and whom the world cannot forget. I have a brother to carry my banner yet, but I think you- you shall not have need of any such thing. You shall carry your own banners, and when you fall, the world shall carry it for centuries to come.”

“Lady Elia-”  _I don’t_ want  _that,_  Sansa thinks, wildly.  _I don’t- I don’t know what I want. I just- I wish I was back in Winterfell with Mother and Father and Robb and Lyarra and-_

_I wouldn’t mind being forgotten if I was happy._

Elia smiles at her, terrible and true, as if she knows Sansa’s mind, as if she knows the epiphany Sansa has just had. “You have grown. You have grown in ways that none of us expected, I think, painfully and regrettably; but grown nevertheless.”

Rickard’s words echo in her ears, then, and Sansa finds herself staring:  _The ghosts that remain without Targaryen blood have some measure of Stark-blood in their veins,_  Rickard had said,  _either that, or a will to overcome a pain more overwhelming than any you can imagine._

Sansa cannot imagine that a Stark married into the Martells, not with the distance between the two realms, not when the Starks never managed to wed into the Targaryens. Which means Elia faced a pain truly unearthly in its immensity, and retained her mind through it.

“Yes,” Sansa says cautiously.

“For your strength, then, with all the tears you’ve never shed over months of terrible pain, I offer one knowledge to you: Joffrey shall not live out the next year.” Elia reaches up and casts something away, and a scrap of silver floats down to the sand below before winking out. She glows a little brighter yet. “And for your kindness, with all the courtesy you’ve offered me over months of captivity, I offer one advice: do not return to your family until you have done what you wish to do, not if you wish to keep the vows you have sworn.”

She turns, and throws her arms upwards, and the beach is flooded with a pale, beautiful light, as if Elia’s taken all the moonlight off the ocean and crystallized it on them.

“And for your humility,” she says, voice echoing, a strange after-beat that sounds like a hundred voices speaking through her own- “with your determination to send your family away despite losing your own freedom, I offer one vow: the House of Martell has no issue with the House of Stark. The oath of vengeance I swore when your aunt ran away with my husband is rescinded.”

Elia holds the position. And above them- far above them, growing out of one of the stars shining in the sky, Sansa sees a silvery tunnel, one which brightens the beach further and leaves Elia looking almost solid. There is no wind that Sansa can see, but Elia’s silks whip about her with more and more fervor, until she looks as if she were being buffeted by a typhoon.

_Do you accept?_

The voice comes not from Elia, but from the silver tunnel above her. If Sansa squints into the light, she thinks she can see other ghosts, a hundred-hundred of them, all with dark hair and tanned skin. The voice thunders up her bones and shakes in her mind, so powerful it hurts.

“Accept-” her own voice shrivels, but Sansa beats down the dryness with all of Visenya’s training. “Accept what?”

_One of our blood has rescinded her oath of vengeance. Daughter-Elia has offered the price of false vengeance. Shall you accept the price, or do you require more?_

Oath of vengeance.

Rickard had mentioned it, once, to Sansa. The oath of vengeance called for equality- from what Rickard had said, Sarra had sworn one against Jonnel when he wed Robyn Ryswell only a moon’s turn after Sansa’s death; Sarra had taken the oath in the name of all the children Jonnel had ensured Sansa could not bear, and in return Robyn Ryswell had borne none either. It’s why Barthogan became Lord after Jonnel, not any of Jonnel’s get.

Sansa doesn’t know what the price of rescinding the vow can be, but she thinks she has a fair idea now: the agreement of the oathsworn party. If she agrees, the oath is dissolved. If she doesn’t…

But dissolving the oath is not a singular issue.

Elia must have needed a reason to stay back through that terrible pain, and now Sansa thinks she knows what it is: hatred, of her husband and of Lyanna Stark. If she lets go of that hatred, then she can move on. Which means that if Sansa refuses to accept her offer, then Elia shall remain in the city where she was raped and murdered for- eternity.

In the end, there’s only one answer she can give.

“I accept,” she says, before correcting herself,  _“we_  accept. House Stark accepts.”

Despite the stutter, the ceremony seems to be concluded. Elia lowers her hands, and when she looks at Sansa, there is a deep satisfaction suffusing her face. She shines so brightly she looks as if the very sun were contained within her bones.

“Thank you,” she says, simply. “I shall have my vengeance on the Lannisters through my brother, Lady Stark, and peace through you, before this new year is finished. And in the next turning, I shall return to the light of my ancestors.” She flicks her fingers, and the silvery light fades away, replaced with the normal light of the stars. It feels so much darker now- Sansa exhales through her teeth. “Thank you, Lady Stark. May you find kindness in the world around you, and may the gods guide you to your destiny without grief. From one princess to another: may you live a long, fruitful life.”

Sansa scrapes for words, but before she can find them, Elia disappears.

 _Goodbye,_  Sansa thinks, and  _I hope you find peace,_  and  _may the gods guide you well._

But even as she slides down the hill and across the beach, footprints fading beneath the rolling tide- Sansa cannot help but remember the silver tunnel above her, showing countless Martells all looking down on their daughter.

She’s never seen anything of that for the Starks.

All the Starks have remained in Winterfell, bound to stone and to a half-life, all for the grief of their ancestor.

 _Unfair,_  Sansa thinks, and cannot shake it for all the time she heads North.

…

The road is hard, but not harder than the Kingsguards’ mailed fists. Sansa binds her breasts as Betha had taught her, smears mud over her arms and eyes and hair, learns to shift her center of gravity lower, rooted. She is slender, still, painfully so; the gentle swells of her breasts and hips are easily disguised in clothes a few sizes too large.

Ghosts help her on her travels- they tell her where old berry-copses are, or knives they’d hidden for centuries, or cloth that won’t be missed for weeks. Sansa learns to steal into a town and out of it without anyone knowing the better. Dark Sister presses bruises into her thighs when she sleeps with it strapped to her waist, but she cannot find it in herself to leave it anywhere else.

Finally,  _finally-_  weeks later, months later, Sansa crests a hill and sees Riverrun.

It shines blue and red. There are rivers roaring around her, ghosts whispering behind her, and her parents, her  _brother,_  they’re almost within sight. Sansa steps forwards, out of the shadows, into the light-

“Sansa,” a woman calls.

_“Mother?”_

A woman steps out of the darkness, smiling up at her. Shining down her back is dark, gleaming hair. Her eyes are light, but not lighter than Lyarra’s. She looks exactly like Sansa remembers her mother to look, only less substantial, only older, only- frailer.

“Hello, Sansa,” she says, and her voice sounds like Sansa’s mother as well, but- but there are differences. “It is good to see you, child. Catelyn spoke true when she said you’ve her look about you, albeit lovelier by far.”

_Not Mother._

“Grandmother,” breathes Sansa.

She smiles warmly. “Eddard did mention your sharp mind.”

“Why are you here?”

Minisa’s face grows more solemn.

“Because,” she says, “I am here to tell you: you cannot see your family.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will have more familial angst than any teenager should ever have to deal with. It's all quasi-canonical angst though, so........


	3. girls who try to save wolves instead of running away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa doesn’t look over her shoulder until she reaches the sea, and then she pauses to splash salt water over her face.
> 
> She cries, then, and calls it seawater.

"You have sworn vows,” Minisa tells her gently. “Vows to find Rhaenys, and other, older vows. Your parents will not allow you to leave once you see them, Sansa. If you stay…”

She trails off. Sansa takes the pause to look at her properly, studying the grandmother she knows so little about. Neither of her parents ever spoke about theirs; her father was a reticent man by nature, and Sansa’s mother had taken her cues from him, it seemed, at least in matters of loss and grief.

And Sansa knows one grandmother, knows her very well indeed.

 _Lyarra is like a knife,_  she thinks, blinking.  _Hard and shining and hidden, until the last moment. Rickard- he’d be a sword, I think, just as hard as Lyarra, yet not half so useful in anything other than the duty envisioned at the making._

_And you, Minisa?_

_What are you?_

Minisa Whent is not so thin as Lyarra, though she is likely just as tall; and where Lyarra had always been the sort of pretty of a gimlet stare and cut-diamond, Minisa’s of a softer look altogether: all large eyes and dark hair and rounded cheeks. She hasn’t braided her hair back as Lyarra had with her mountain-braids, nor even as Sansa’s own mother had favored, nor as the fashion in the south tended to favor, instead letting it hang around her in loose curtains.

The only decoration on both her clothes and her hair are flowers, in fact. There’s flowers embroidered along her skirts and sleeves, and small blossoms woven into her hair with all the neatness of a crown.

“I’m so close,” Sansa tries, watching Minisa closely. “All I need to do is speak to them, and then-”

“And then, they shan’t allow you to get away.” Minisa purses her lips. “They shall hide you away, and you’ll have to run away again, and that’s not half so likely to be a success if you reveal your disguise to them.”

 _I dreamed my father out of the Red Keep. I dragged my sister out of King’s Landing as it crawled with Lannister soldiers. I walked out of the Crownlands on my own two feet despite being hunted by_ everyone, _and I did it with only the dead on my side._

“But of more importance,” Minisa continues blithely, “is that even if you are  _able,_  you’d likely not wish to. When my first son died- I fled Riverrun, did you know? All the way to Harrenhal, and never once looked back for half a year.” She doesn’t look at Sansa, choosing to focus on her hands instead. “It would be far more painful to force you away after the shortest glimpse and taste of them, I’m sure.”

“Are you.” It’s not a question, but that’s mostly because Sansa recognizes another person’s fingerprints over all of this- the secrecy, the silence, the insistence of reducing her burden- all of her grandfather’s favorite tricks. The surge of rage inside of her frightens Sansa in its intensity, but she doesn’t attempt to dampen it.

She advances instead, a step closer to her grandmother. “Are these your ideas, or my grandfather’s? For he surely thought the same of me. It was foolishness then, and foolishness now, to think that I will not be able to bear these burdens. Not when far greater have rested on my shoulders.”

_Do not think me a child, not when I have spent a lifetime dancing with death._

Minisa doesn’t answer for a long moment. Then she lifts a hand and holds it aloft, palm upturned; one of the flowers ringing her wrists detaches itself, and it flickers away, shining brighter and brighter as it goes.

“House Whent is young,” she says, turning her eyes back to Sansa. “But my mother’s family is not. You’ve heard of House Blackwood, I trust?”

Sansa inclines her head slowly, anger still stiffening her joints.

“My mother was Lord Blackwood’s second daughter. And the Blackwoods have always been able to see things others cannot.” She shakes her head, thick hair sliding as she does. “I was never so strong in the gift, not enough to prophesize, but I can sense.”

“And what do you sense?”

“A girl of courage and life,” Minisa says. “With kindness bred deep inside of her. But that same kindness will be your undoing, for the people you shall find when you walk inside of Riverrun are people who hold your heart in their hands. For your own sake, you may be able to walk outside; but not when you see their grief, nor their pain.

“My mother was a Blackwood,” she repeats. Her hand flicks to the side, and the flower that flew away shines, brilliantly, in the center of her palm. “I have some gifts yet, granddaughter, and love enough to help you. But you cannot return. Not if you wish to keep the vows you have sworn.”

All of a sudden, Sansa remembers Elia: dark-skinned, sun-eyed Elia, who’d told her in a voice of thunder those same words.

“Fine,” she says, and struggles to keep her voice even, to ensure it doesn’t wobble from the strain of what she’s sacrificing. “Fine, I won’t go there. I’ll stay away.”

Minisa doesn’t answer her. She holds her hand out, instead, the one with a thin-stemmed, silvery flower on it.

“Look,” she orders. Her voice is deeper than before, deeper and richer. “You are my blood, of House Blackwood through me, with a hundred Blackwood wedding peaces through your father’s father’s father’s mother. Blackwoods, of the wolfswood and the Unnamed and the old weirwood- descendants of Benedict Blackwood, who led us south of the Neck when the North became unsafe; sons of Brynden, who saved our line from extinction when the Unnamed Castle tried to strike down our line; daughters of Agnes, who cursed the Hoares to ever be blind to loyalty, when she saw Lord Bracken’s betrayal.”

The flower seems to be shining brighter, but Sansa can’t be sure; the sun’s so bright, the air-

“Look closely, granddaughter,” says Minisa, “for Agnes paid a price to blind the Hoares. Our women see what is not to be seen, and you have that blood twice over.”

She whistles, high and clear, and even as Sansa jumps the flower twists, melting in on itself before rising to hang in the air like a slender, shining jewel.  _A jewel,_ thinks Sansa,  _or a mirror._  And as she stares, the flat surface of the mirror darkens into red stone; then resolves into a- a sort of window.

“What-”

“Shh,” whispers Minisa. “See. Think on it later.”

A window showing two women and three men. Two of the men and one of the women have russet hair, and the other man and woman have black hair; they’re all seated around a table, and the tapestries around them are rich and thick.

Then Sansa sees their faces, and she cries out.

It’s her mother- her mother, and her father, and Robb and Arya; and another man, one she thinks must be her uncle. They all look good, too: there’s a livid scar running down her father’s face, and Arya’s hair is shorn shorter than Sansa’s ever seen on a girl; but they’re alive, and there’s a brightness to their eyes and a fullness to their cheeks that leaves her own chest tight with relief.

“This is-”

“Your family,” says Minisa. “My family. As they are right now, as my flower sees them.” Her blue eyes flicker from Sansa to the scene, and she softens. “They are well. All of them.”

Arya says something, and Robb laughs at it. Their parents look a mix between appalled and amused, and her uncle looks like he’s just hiding his own laughter, and Sansa can feel tears that have no right to come prickle at the corners of her eyes.

“They’re- they’re happy?” Sansa asks, swallowing hard enough to make her throat ache something fierce. “Content?”

“They are worried.” She flicks a piece of hair behind her, but her eyes are still affixed to Sansa; steady as any blade. “But there was a time when the worry was greater, and the possibility of failure higher, and that time was not too long ago.”

She does some motion with her wrists, and the window rises, hovering in the air now instead of balanced on her palm. Then Minisa reaches out and touches the side of Sansa’s face.

It is gentler than Visenya’s ever been. It’s gentler than Rickard at his softest. It’s gentler than Lyarra, too, the coolness nothing but the chill of an early summer morning, and it’s that same gentleness that makes her gasp, feeding the crushing pain inside of Sansa instead of lessening it.

“Cry, granddaughter,” Minisa murmurs, stepping closer, hands enfolding her. “If there is one thing you can do, here, now, it is weep.”

“Tears are- useless.” She scrabbles for a modicum of control, but Minisa is as pitiless in this as she was kind before, her hands smoothing down Sansa’s dress, rustling over Sansa’s rough-shorn hair. “That’s what- what Visenya said, and Elia, and Rickard, and Brandon as well. I must-”

“Not all tears are so,” Minisa says quietly. “You are so young- it’s easy to forget that, but we mustn’t, I think. Not if you are to survive this battle. Not all tears are useless, sweetling, and not all griefs are equal. Did you never think why they stopped you from weeping?”

“If I began, I would never stop.”

Minisa looks sad, in the fractured pieces that Sansa can see through her pooling tears. “For the pain was not at an end, not unless you walked out. And you couldn’t walk out if you were not trained, and you could not train if you were crying. But now: you cannot put this grief aside. Face it, accept it, and move on.” She reaches out and lifts Sansa’s chin. “Or do not. Those are your only choices.”

_But I swore to you._

_I do not think you have ever known what it is to not touch another person for more than a year, grandmother. I do not think you have ever gone so long without a person’s love, and their arms, and their warmth._

_And I am so_ close, _and you ask me to walk away, when I could forget my vows and fall asleep tonight besides my sister and mother._

“I swore to you,” Sansa whispers.

“One does not ask a bleeding man to cut out his heart.” Minisa steps away, slowly. “If I’d known how cruel they’d been- I would never have asked this of you.”

Sansa bows her head, the tears still resting in her chest, heavy, smothering. She thinks about how easy it would be to walk away. She thinks about Elia, and a whirling cyclone of silver-studded Martells above her. She thinks about Rickard, and how angry, how breathtakingly furious she still is at him.

She thinks about her father, cradling his sister in his arms, giving his entire life to a terrible lie.

She thinks about Robb, who’s carrying a crown on his Tully-red hair and slender shoulders.

She thinks about legacies.

 _I asked you not to treat me a child,_  she thinks, looking at Minisa through her lashes. _But you’re right: I could not have walked away after seeing them. Not after knowing the pain of separation._

“Starks were not always honorable,” Sansa says, keeping her voice low so it doesn’t crack. “But my grandfather was, and my father after him, and my brother after him, and the same blood is in me.”

It’s not a real answer, but it’s enough of one.

Minisa nods and says nothing more on the subject, for which Sansa is grateful. “Then I shall guide you until you cross the Trident. There’s a copse on the way that you can rest in for tonight- it has enough apples for your dinner, and grass soft enough for a restful sleep.”

…

The copse is, indeed, comfortable.

Minisa sits beside her, and when she stares up at the stars, she starts to talk.

“Did your mother tell you of the Blackwoods?”

“No,” Sansa replies.

“We were of the North first,” Minisa murmurs, voice lilting like a bird. “In the wolfswood we stayed, wielding swords of silver and weirwood. Until a Stark grew greedy and forced us to flee; and then we fled south, past the Neck, all the way to a castle ruled by a house called Mudd.”

“River Kings,” says Sansa.

She feels sleepy, exhausted despite having more food in her belly and better rest than she’s had in weeks. There hasn’t been any game to catch, nor fire to light, nor water to fetch; Sansa’s likely safer here than she has been since she left King’s Landing. Perhaps it’s that which makes her eyes droop, her mind slow.

“They allied with us, helped us build a home of our own, gave us weirwood seeds and offered us a kingship. We named the Mudds High Kings and knelt to them honestly.” Minisa sweeps her hand along the ground and little bursts of light follow her path, forming faint, shimmering ghost-flowers. “For seven-seven generations it was a true peace. And then a fool of a Mudd raised the Brackens from horse breeders to nobility, after they’d betrayed us; and the Blackwoods rebelled.”

She clenches her fist. The flowers blink out of sight.

“We were slain,” Minisa says, “down to the last child. The Mudds were unforgiving of treachery, and the Blackwoods were unstinting in their pride; and so the stones of our home ran red with blood, and when it was over the Mudds tore down the castle and sowed the land with salt, so things would never grow again.”

“But not everyone,” says Sansa. “For you are here, and other Blackwoods as well.”

Minisa smiles, secretive. “All were slain,” she repeats, “except for Brynden Blackwood, whom his Bracken mother stole away to Stone Hedge.” She flutters her fingers, and silver light gleams between them like a thousand miniature daggers. “Brynden returned, when he was grown, and saw how the home he’d been born in was ruined. He took an oath of vengeance, and House Mudd saw its end not a few years later, when the Andals came.” The smile grows into something vaguely unholy, on Minisa’s soft features. “The castle is called Oldstones by others. But we Blackwoods know, and we remember that the castle’s true name is lost to us because of our own’s oath.”

It takes Sansa an embarrassingly long time to make the connections.

“That’s why you call it the Unnamed, not Oldstones,” she says slowly. “Because-”

“Because it  _is_  unnamed, under my- our- ancestor’s curse. Its lands are sown with salt, and all that remains of it is the tomb of their last king.”

“I would like to see it, I think.” Sansa closes her eyes and imagines that rage, that despair. She wonders what the air would feel like, in a place so steeped in death. “It would be different to-”

Minisa’s long hair flutters around her, and she reaches out with one hand, trailing long, dripping rivers of silver across the grass. “If you ever go there,” she says, voice solemner than Sansa’s ever heard it, “you will die, and it shall be more painful than any death you have heard of.”

And, abruptly, the sleep flees from Sansa’s mind, replaced by the same terror that’s dodged her footsteps for over a year.  _Death,_ she thinks. Death and all its implications.

_I’m not ready to become a ghost. Not yet._

“Why?”

“To see us, you need one eye on the other side,” Minisa says. “To see the dead you need to be dead; and that is what you are: one eye, dead in spirit though not in reality. It happened so young to you-” she clicks her tongue sympathetically, “-did you know that the cold can damage one’s eyes? Particularly the young. You recovered, of course; but a dead thing remembers being dead. And so you saw your grandmother, and saw the other ghosts. But being dead means being affected by the dead.”

“There are ghosts in Oldstones,” she breathes.

“Ghosts who would like to spill as much of your Blackwood blood as possible.”

Sansa breathes in and out, slowly, before she says, “If I go straight to the shoreline-”

“The Greyjoys are watchful, and the Mallisters are fools.” Minisa sighs. “And it is still your best bet. I cannot go past the Trident, but I know of others who can help you.” She nods, satisfied. “You will reach Winterfell, my dear, never fear for that.”

The night air is cold, and Minisa’s fingers are just slightly colder. She gleams in the darkness, like a silvered lamp. Sansa closes her eyes and falls asleep to that, to bursts of light behind her eyes.

…

She dreams of sunlight, of an endless field stretching out before her, flowers of a thousand different breeds, shades shimmering. Minisa stands in the middle, and she looks brighter than she’d ever looked as a ghost.

 _Dance with me,_  she says.  _Dance with me!_

They dance, in large, curving arcs that are far too graceful for human motion. After a time, Minisa sings as well; she sounds like a bird, her voice high and sharp. It feels like syrup, and Arya’s face when she eats lemoncakes on Sansa’s nameday despite hating the taste, and all the grief she felt to walk away from King’s Landing alone.

When they stop, the sky is more golden than blue, and some of the flowers have wilted.

 _You must leave,_  Minisa whispers, arms warm along Sansa’s sides, hair thick and dark around her face. She looks sad, but fierce as well, and triumphant.  _I cannot keep you safe forever. But you are my eldest daughter’s eldest daughter, dearest: you will always have a home here. And if you ever find yourself on the verge of breaking- promise me that you will follow the flowers. Promise me that you shall return, if ever you find yourself too worn to go on._

 _Why?_  Sansa asks, because she knows ghosts, and she knows humans, and she knows that those who do good and ask for nothing in return are often the most dangerous people of all.

A wind builds up around Minisa, so heavy it tugs at Sansa’s clothes and almost makes her stumble.

 _Everyone deserves safe harbor,_ she says. _If you cannot find that in others, I shall be that for you._

She smiles, and then she flicks her fingers, and all the warmth that had sunk into Sansa’s bones vanishes like a smothered candle.

…

Sansa jerks awake.

Minisa hovers a few feet away.

“That’s it,” says Sansa, staring. “You- when I first saw you, I thought there was something strange- something different. I thought you couldn’t-”

 _Be trusted._  She bites that back at the last moment, though Minisa seems to have understood her anyhow.

“-but you’re happy. That’s the difference between you and- and the others. You’re  _happy.”_

“It isn’t worth the time to be unhappy,” Minisa replies, arching a brow. “It was not always easy, perhaps, but- what have I to gain from being miserable? You find the pieces of life that give you joy and you hold tight to it.”

Visenya had never been happy, Sansa realizes, suddenly, abruptly assured of it. Not for a single day in her life. She’d wanted to swallow the world, wanted to conquer it, and she had- but she was never  _happy._

“That’s not how others do it.”

“No? How foolish of them.”

People remembered Visenya. They remembered Elia and her terrible wrath. They remembered Lyarra, too, with her frozen sort of grief. Very few people ever remembered Minisa Tully. Even fewer remembered Minisa Whent. Sansa had never even heard her grandmother’s mother’s family until she’d met her.

“Between greatness and happiness,” Sansa says slowly, “which would you choose?”

“I have a garden of all the flowers I’ve ever wanted,” Minisa replies, looking down demurely. Then she looks at Sansa, through her lashes, dark as the night around them, and her eyes are shining. “I am great, here, greater than any other gardener in all the world. And I am happy to be so. If you are happy, dearest, then you shall be great. There is not one without the other.”

 _Well,_ Sansa thinks,  _that is certainly one way to think on it._

…

At the Trident, before she crosses, Sansa turns back to Minisa.

She wonders what she looks like, now; her hair is cropped close to her skull, and the clothes she wears are baggy to hide her figure. Sansa makes a tall, rail-thin boy, but with her face smudged with mud and circles beneath her eyes, she passes muster. She has none of the loveliness that her parents had so carefully tended.

Sansa’d been easy to love, once. Now she is… harder, and harsher, and bitter besides. She’s not-

Arya had fought bitterly with everyone, but they’d all loved her. Robb and Jon would have all chosen Arya over Sansa in a heartbeat, and her father too, like as not. And their mother would be the most horrified of all to see Sansa as she is now. It’s not quite cowardice that spurs Sansa away from Riverrun, but it’s not too different, either.

She’d once been easy to love, and they hadn’t loved her much then.

What is to change now?

“I’ll miss you,” she says, quietly, to Minisa.

“And I you.” Minisa reaches forwards and brushes a hand over Sansa’s cheek, soft enough that she can barely feel it. “I look forward to hearing of your adventures, granddaughter. And to seeing you without terror in your eyes.” She tips her head to the side. “You are already so beautiful, but then- oh, sweetling, you’ll be radiant then.”

_If nothing else, I have the ghosts._

That’s a prickly thought. If the ghosts, too, had a choice- but they don’t.

They are all prickly thoughts, in truth. Love is something that Sansa’s wanted for so long, and now she’s sacrificing it in favor of the vows she’s sworn and the tasks she’s shouldered. She wonders when she grew up, but she’s pretty sure she won’t like the answer.

“I hope so,” she says, through the lump in her throat, and doesn’t look behind her as she crosses the river.

…

Sansa doesn’t look over her shoulder until she reaches the sea, and then she pauses to splash salt water over her face.

She cries, then, and calls it seawater.

…

(Of all the things Minisa’s done in the scarce day they’ve known each other- these tears are the most and least painful. Sansa doesn’t understand it, but if she were in the business of understanding things she’d have been a septa.

She’s a princess instead, a princess and a daughter and a Stark, and if there’s one thing all those three have in common it’s sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness.

Sansa cannot afford to forget that.)

…

When she sees Winterfell, Sansa’s hard-pressed to keep silent. It rises in front of her, shining and larger than she remembers it to be- there’s smoke and char marring its outer walls but it yet has more majesty to it than any other castle Sansa’s seen over the past year.

 _When I return, I will scrub the ash from your walls,_ she promises. _I will wash away the scars and patch up the broken pieces and then- then I will bring a king home. The North shall reign freely soon, soon enough._

But right now, Greyjoy colors fly from its walls, dark and terrible against the pale stone. Sansa cannot leave the safety of the trees, doesn’t dare to go any closer to the castle, even with her disguise; the ghosts that are accompanying her now- a woodsman who’d died along the Kingsroad years before Torrhen knelt, and a boy with Stark-dark eyes and hair who’d slipped and drowned in a well even before that- are strong enough to walk the distance instead.

So she waits.

And waits.

And waits.

Sansa waits, right up until she’s bowled over by a wolf that almost matches her height- pale, with gold eyes and two tattered ribbons hanging from its fur.

 _“Lady!”_  Sansa shouts, before biting the sound back.

But she doesn’t hesitate to throw her arms around Lady’s neck, nor to snuggle closer to her; it’s been more than a year since Sansa saw her last, and where she’d left a stumbling pup, she now has a wolf that looks just as deadly as its mother had ever been. There’s no fear in her, though: only happiness, and warmth, despite all the snows, despite her own ragged clothes.

“Oh, I’ve missed you,” she mumbles into Lady’s fur. “It’s- it’s been a very long time.”

A long time, with only ghosts for comfort and whispers for assistance. Even longer since they’ve seen each other; Sansa’d left her behind before they went south at the first.

And here they stand: Lady, twice as tall, teeth sharpened, broad as a bear; Sansa, hair slashed to the scalp, a sword strapped to her waist, a cloak of homespun wool wrapped around barely-patched clothes.

Sansa reaches for the ribbons and unwinds them, slowly, from Lady’s back. They’re dark, with burrs caught on one side and mud spotting the other. But the silk is still smooth. It feels like a sort of benediction, to rub her fingers along the softness- how long has it been since she touched something like this?

“Too long.”

Her head jerks up, and sees Lyarra.

(Sansa has experienced a lifetime’s worth of emotion in the past year.

Fear, and love, and hate, and courage- in a thousand minute ways different to itself each time.

But never something like this.

It feels like wings of fire, sweeping up her chest and throat; like the beauty of Elia’s family, watching over her even through death; like the vision she’d seen of her parents and brother and sister, sitting around a table and laughing in broad daylight.)

She lunges forwards, back’s arch almost matching Lady’s only a few moments earlier, and even when she doesn’t feel anything but a cold that blisters her cheeks- Sansa cries, and laughs, and embraces Lyarra as best she can through the veil of death.

“It’s been far too long,” Lyarra whispers. Her fingers dance over Sansa’s neck, and then across to the back of her spine, where a scar from a Kingsguard’s sword still lingers. “Oh, darling child, sweetling- I heard the stories- I was so  _angry-”_

“I didn’t,” she whispers back. “I saw them, Lyarra- Brandon and- and Rickard- and they told me that you weren’t talking. That  _no one_  was talking, and they were so worried, and I was so worried- and then I came back and it was-”

“Not worth it,” Lyarra whispers, and she looks sad, and she looks steady, and she looks beautiful. In the long, pale lines of her face, Sansa feels like she’s home again.

“No,” she says, and neither of them cry, neither of them can so much as touch as one another- but something deep within Sansa’s soul eases anyhow.

…

“Rickard was- unhappy.”

“He always was,” says Lyarra, wryly. “Even at his happiest- he was never the kind to be uncomplicatedly happy.”

“I don’t like him,” Sansa murmurs. She’s thought about what she’ll say to Lyarra for such a long time- but here, now, there’s only the truth in her mouth, hard and unvarnished and indelicate. There have never been lies between them, and she won’t begin now. “He was bitter, and cruel with it.”

Lyarra measures her. “Rickard was never cruel when I knew him. Cold, yes, and bitter often; but never cruel. Death must have been harsh on him.”

“Your absence was harsh on him.”

She bows her head. “Yes. I can see that happening, certainly.” A breath, and then her eyes, piercing and too-knowledgeable, meet Sansa’s again. “What did he do to you?”

_He took my trust, and he ruined it._

“I loved him,” says Sansa, quietly. “But he did not love me. Only the vision he had of me. And when I did not measure up to that vision- he did not change, only tried to change me to fit.” Her lips twist, slightly, in humor that’s not truly humorous. “It was… it isn’t an experience I’d like to have again.”

“I suppose not.” Lyarra reaches forwards and brushes a hand over Sansa’s wrist. “Sansa- such lessons- oh, I wish you’d not have needed to learn them. But you are harder for it, and you would not have been taught them in Winterfell. You would not have the strength to do what you must, now.”

“And what must I do now?”

Lyarra hesitates. “How much has Rickard told you?”

“Enough.” Sansa feels her heart start to race. “Lyarra, please. If there’s something to be done-”

“There are many things to be done,” says Lyarra, gently. “There are always things to be done. But that does not mean that it is your responsibility. Others weren’t even told of their duties until they were past their first blood- or had gained their first swords- and you’ve started learning the tales far before that.”

“But it’s important.”

“Yes,” she acknowledges. “Very.”

“Then what-”

“Oh, my dearest daughter,” whispers Lyarra, reaching up to cup Sansa’s cheeks, her hands freezing, tears shining in her pale, pale eyes, “descendant of my blood, child of my heart: I must send you to your death today-” Sansa’s heart skips a beat, but she cannot move, “-and I cannot tell you how much this pains me, but when the dead come…” She bows her head over Sansa’s face. They are almost of a height, now, where Sansa’d been half a head shorter before leaving Winterfell. “When the dead come, you either fight them or you join them. There is nothing between. And the risk of death is better than sure death.”

“Lyarra,” says Sansa, almost voiceless, in a voice that would have been trembling on any other person, “where do you want me to go?”

“North of the Wall,” says Lyarra.

…

Sansa does not ask Lyarra  _why would I go._ Lyarra hears the question anyhow, and her hands come up to rest on Sansa's shoulders.

 _The last I knew,_ she says, hesitantly, slowly,  _your brothers were alive. And where Bran went is where you go: to the three-eyed crow, whose name is Brynden Rivers._

For a long, breathless moment, Sansa cannot breathe from the knowledge.

She thinks of her mother’s face, and her father’s eyes, and Robb’s gentle strength. She thinks of Arya and Jon and Theon and all the other people she’s not loved half so much as they deserved. She thinks of the dead, and how desperate one must be to ask a granddaughter to walk into their midst.

She remembers Bran’s laughter and Rickon’s giggles.

Then, some old courage fueling her voice, she whispers,  _Yes._

...

That night, Sansa is ready.

There’s a pack of food on her shoulders, a knife stolen from the kitchens that’s freshly sharpened, a heavier cloak and boots to shield her from the cold. With some deft needlework she’ll be able to cut her old cloak to use for pockets; with luck, she’ll have enough game on the way to pad the lining a bit as well.

“Remember,” says Lyarra. “You will need help to scale the Wall. Pretend to be a wildling, or threaten some villagers into helping you- but do  _not_  go to the Night’s Watch. They watch their doors with ever-greater vigilance. Once you’re past the Wall…”

“I know what to do,” says Sansa. She tests the straps of the pack before deciding they’ll hold for one night’s trekking. She’ll need to tie it off again later, but it’s manageable, she hopes. “I’ll get there, Lyarra. But will they help?”

“Our death is their death,” Lyarra replies firmly. “They’ll help if they have any minds left to them.”

Which is precisely what Sansa’s doubting the existence of, but if this is their only hope then it won’t do to snuff it out so simply.  _So slender a ray,_  she thinks, strapping Dark Sister to her waist.  _To hold back the darkness of death. Let us pray it will last through the night._

“You’ll follow me?”

Lyarra does not touch her; Sansa is glad of it.

She feels battle-ready in these clothes, ill-fitting though they are, and it is a fragile feeling. If Lyarra touches her she feels as if she might break apart. Hopefully this bravado can last her through the trek North.

“Yes,” says Lyarra. “For as long as I can. And then I will find another to accompany you, and then another, and then another. You shall not be alone, Sansa, I promise you.”

Sansa’s hands dig into the warmth of Lady’s fur and then into the chill of Lyarra’s palms.

 _I trust you,_  she thinks, and walks onwards.

…

Three days later: Sansa bids goodbye to Lyarra.

There’s a ghost there, waiting for her. He’s taller than her by nearly three heads. His hair is cut so short she can see his scalp, and there’s a flash of a weapon anytime he moves. It’s like being next to a very large, very dangerous porcupine.

“Which gate’re we gettin’ to?” he asks.

 _Stay away from the Night’s Watch,_ Lyarra had told her. _They watch the gates with ever increasing vigilance._

 _I trust you,_  Sansa thinks, and feels the warmth of Lady by her side, feels the air in her lungs increase as she breathes in.  _But I do not trust you enough, Grandmother._

“Castle Black’s,” she tells the ghost. “I need help.”

…

The ghost’s name is Willam. It takes Sansa some time to reconcile this Willam- giant, prickly-edged, warm-hearted- with the Willam in Artos’ stories.

When she realizes, Willam laughs.

“Oh, yes, Artos always took care of me. Twins we were; but he was the better with his sword, and me with my tongue.” He taps his chest and winks at Sansa. “See, little daughter: size matters little, in the larger scheme of things. ‘Tis skill that matters most of all, and I’ve never had any in war.”

“He made you sound-” Sansa searches for the words.  _Indestructible. Indefatigable. Insane._  “Like the best man he knew.”

It’s the truth. Artos and Donnor hate each other; they refuse to talk through the year and shout on the solstice over Errold’s death. But Donnor has Berena, and Artos- he’s always been alone, isolated from even his wife and children.

Sansa thinks she understands now.

“Little daughter,” says Willam, kneeling to match her now, his eyes warm on her face, all laughter gone. “Artos and I- we were closer than brothers. My death ruined him, according to Lyarra, because he couldn’t ever recover that. And he died inside Winterfell; he can’t leave it- and I cannot enter. We are separated forever.” He sighs. “I died to save him. He thinks he can never repay that debt, and does not realize it wasn’t a debt at all.”

“I’m… sorry.”

“Do not be sorry,” he says, suddenly, fiercely. “Understand. There are debts between people, yes, often, but the world is not all of that. There is love as well. There are things which are offered freely, and to name a price to that kind of gift is an insult of itself. The paths you tread are lined with debts, little daughter, but you must never forget the gifts as well.”

Sansa, watching her father and sister flee into the distance. Sansa, forgiving Elia for nothing but the rightness of that forgival. Sansa, walking away from Riverrun and Winterfell and all the homes that have ever been hers.

 _Where are my gifts?_  She wants to scream, suddenly, with the horrible wrongness of it all. She has been given debts and she has given gifts, but never the other way. How dare the world be weighted against her so much? How  _dare-_

Willam rises to his feet, and the silvery light of the sun makes a thousand rainbows dance over her skin.

And she remembers Brandon.

Brandon, watching over her even when he could do nothing. Betha and Alysanne and Rhaella, chaining their tormentors, fighting them off so Sansa could flee in peace. Minisa, pressing flowers into Sansa’s hands and dancing with her through the night.

_Do not forget your gifts._

She reaches out and hugs Lady close, before rising to her own feet. They’ve another half day’s walk to go, and it looks to snow soon.

Every step of the way, she feels hollowed out.

Hollowed and filled with light, all at once.

...

When they reach the Wall, Sansa pauses to smear mud and snow over her face and- most importantly- her hair. It’s too light; it’s too vibrant; it’s too noticeable. Willam tells her where to add it so she looks more grungy than in a disguise, and respectable enough not to make people wonder why an orphan’s sneaking into Castle Black.

“Good luck,” he says. “This is far’s I go- can’t go within castles. M’head’s weird that way.” A moment’s pause, and then Willam continues: “I’ll be here if you need me after.”

“Yes,” says Sansa, slowly, trying to find a way to show Willam how thankful she is for his presence. He’s fading away, almost disappeared, when she says, “Thank you.”

Two words. They aren’t worth anything much.

But Willam would know the weight of words, best of all his brothers, better than most of her ancestors. He’d used them to beat back armies. He’d used them to  _create_  armies.

When he was captured by wildlings and held at the Long Lake with his brother- it was his words that allowed his brother to escape. His lack of skill in arms meant Willam didn’t leave alive; but his skill in words meant the wildlings didn’t kill his brother. Sansa looks at him, this giant of a man with steel on every part of his body, this man who died because his life didn’t mean half so much to him as other’s happiness, and she hopes he knows how deep her gratitude goes, deeper than the marrow of her bones.

 _Unconditional._  So easy to forget its meaning, but she cannot. Sansa refuses to forget. Not anymore.

“Thank you,” she says, again, because she cannot put a price to her gratitude, because she will not cheapen it that way.  _“Thank you.”_

Willam smiles. “It has been long since a shieldbrother walked beside me. I enjoyed the company, little daughter, never fear. And- do not fear. Not for all the years you live. You will never be alone. That much I can swear to you.” He nods and disappears, leaving Sansa in the woods a few minutes’ walk from Castle Black.

…

Slowly, she picks her way towards the castle.

Once inside- it’s dark and cold, and a perpetual sort of dampness that makes her skin prickle uncomfortably. The mud in her hair cakes against her scalp. She can feel the part of it along the back of her neck slide down her spine.

At one hallway, she pauses. She must keep to the shadows; that much is true no matter where she goes. But she can go down or forwards at this juncture, and she has little idea where Jon is. Either might be accurate. Forwards means a higher likelihood of people, but down- Sansa’s no idea where down will go.

A breath, then two, and she squares her shoulders before stepping onto the stairs.

One hall, then another; down and down into earth that’s been frozen for longer than Winterfell’s walls have stood. She doesn’t know where she’s going, precisely, but she has- a feeling. Not a premonition, nor even the aid of ghosts; Sansa doesn’t trust these ghosts, who have sharp teeth and sharper eyes. But there is some deep weight guiding her here, as a dissonant sound in an orchestra would yet be audible- some old thing, a lodestone keeping her silent and steady on her feet.

“I’ve no desire to-”

“-they’ll  _get_  the desire if I shove enough swords up-”

_“-enough!”_

Three voices, a burst of noise like sunbursts in darkness, and then silence. Sansa goes still and presses her fingers to the hard-packed earth behind her, grounding herself in the darkness.

 _Who would hide in darkened tunnels?_ One foot to the side, body flush against the wall. They won’t be able to find her here. _People with things to hide._

“There’ll be consequences to doin’ this,” says the first man, who has a slow, deep voice. “People like him. Ain’t going to be easy to keep rumors down, not with his friends poking about.”

“Which is why we must plan it,” the third man says flatly. “This must be done carefully. Removing the Lord Commander is a dangerous task in and of itself, but the wildlings shall be a bigger threat than any of Lord Snow’s friends.”

 _Removing?_  Sansa thinks. Then, slow and thick, panic threaded through it:  _Snow?_

“A fucking army is what it is.” Disgust curdles the second man’s voice. “Ready-made for him to do whatever he wants.”

“Aye. If we can get him-”

“Snow’s not an idiot,” says the third man. “He’ll guess if one of us try anything.”

“Then, what?” asks the second man. “We’ll have to take out his steward if you want to put somethin’ in his drink. He’s too watchful to let such a thing slip.”

There’s a shuffling sound, before the first man says, “The whore’s not the problem. What would we do after putting it in his drink?”

“I know you aren’t the sharpest person here,” drawls the third man, “but this is ridiculous, Yarwyck.”

Silence, and then a yelp sounds; Sansa digs her nails into her hands to keep from reacting.

“We can decide after that,” says the second man, sounding impatient with the entire situation. “Cut his throat, stab him in the-”

Sansa doesn’t hear anything more. There’s a river roaring in her ears, crashing through her veins. A man is going to die soon and Sansa has to- she  _has_  to save him, she has information that could save him- but she cannot be seen either, and she has another task ahead of her, one infinitely more important, and-

_Breathe._

Sansa steps out into the hallway and spins neatly into a boy’s shoulders, driving them both into the floor. He swears under his breath before seeing her, still huddled against the far wall; then he rises and brushes off his knees, extending a hand.

“Sorry for the-” he pauses, looking at her. “Is something the matter? You look as if you’ve seen a-”

She can walk away. She has a world to save, and a brother to find, and one Lord Commander of a Watch that hasn’t done much of its duty for as long as she’s known it- he shouldn’t tip the balance.

 _I’m not ready to die,_ thinks Sansa, before reaching out and grasping the boy’s hand. _I do not get to decide that anyone else is._

“The Lord Commander,” says Sansa, remembering only at the last moment to pitch her voice as low as she can make it. “Do you know where he is?”

There’s a pause, before the boy says, slowly: “Yes.” There’s a note to his voice that’s suddenly uncomfortable, that’s abruptly wary.

Sansa draws herself up, straight as she can make her spine. She knows, intimately, how ridiculous she looks; and still she can do nothing but hope she looks impressive enough to intimidate the boy into taking her to the Lord Commander.

“I need you to take me to him.”

“Why?”

“Because.” She leans her weight against the wall, testing the bruises along her knees before deciding her legs can hold her up. “It’s important.” There’s a burn along the boy’s wrist, and Sansa recognizes it as done by dripping candle wax as used for stamping letters. Two ideas snap together in her mind as so many matchsticks. “M’master wants to sell candles. She sent me to get a buyer.”

“She,” says the boy, folding his arms over his front. “You telling me that  _she_  goes by the title master?”

The curl to his hair, the soft brown tint that she’s seen on only one another family- Sansa makes a wild guess that she can only hope bears through.

“You’re not from the North, are you?” A girl would scoff, but a boy would twist his lips derisively. Sansa does a strange mix of both, instincts warring with each other. “A master’s got a mastery in a craft. Doesn’t matter if they’re man or woman. And  _mine_  asked me for buyers.”

“At Castle Black?” asks the boy incredulously.

“I don’t think there’s a darker castle around,” answers Sansa, solemn as she can manage. “If anyone needs candles here, it’ll be you lot.” A smile tugs at her lips, and she doesn’t bother to control it to say: “Winter’s coming, you know? You’ll need the light.”

Slowly, the boy smiles. “Very well, then. You’re amusing enough, I suppose. It’ll make a good distraction for Jon.”

Her heart skips a beat.

“Jon?”

“Well.” He rubs at the back of his neck, half-sheepish. “Lord Commander. Lord Commander Snow, if we’re being accurate, but he- doesn’t like that title much. So if you want to sell your candles don’t call him that.”

_Jon Snow._

_Lord Commander._

“I think,” says Sansa, faintly, “I ought to re-negotiate terms with my master. I’ll come back on the morrow.”

…

Hiding in the woods, she presses her hands to the snow and then her hands to her head.

Lady whines behind her. Sansa feels like she’s on the verge of tearing her hair out, caught as she is between frustration, worry, and fear.

It dovetails quite nicely, protecting the Lord Commander and getting Jon to help her cross the Wall, but Sansa’s quite certain that leaving Jon with just a warning won’t have much of an effect. If a warning won’t be enough that means she has to take action, and threatening isn’t much her style.

 _Taking action can go both ways. There are two groups here, not just the people trying to kill Jon- there’s_ Jon, _too._

_And I need help._

Ghosts can help her south of the Wall. North of it- Sansa doesn’t know anyone there. Lyarra had been deliberately vague on instructions past getting to the cave of the three-eyed crow, though Sansa isn’t certain if that’s because she doesn’t know or because she doesn’t want Sansa to know.

“I’ll need help out there,” she tells Lady. “It’s going to be dangerous. I’m going to need help, with hunting and hiding- the dead are out there, in greater numbers. And Jon’s a thousand times better than me with a sword.”

One beat, then two, then three.

“So we bring Jon with us.” She tests the sentence out into the air, before dropping back to her knees. “But  _how?”_

One direwolf and one girl. She can disguise herself as a boy and, with a little luck, sneak Lady inside. But there’s still little chance of getting Jon by himself for long enough that Sansa can explain everything, not that and get him to believe it.

_Who would believe that their sister can speak to ghosts?_

Lady growls low in her throat, nudging Sansa’s shoulder.  _I don’t want to fail,_ Sansa thinks, letting her forehead fall to the fur.  _But there isn’t time enough for me to go to one of the other gates, and Jon will be too wary of a strange direwolf to follow it. I don’t want to fail, I don’t- I can’t think about the consequences- but-_

She thinks about Lyarra and Visenya and Minisa and her own parents, all of whom have loved her for so long, with such depth. She imagines them gone, mindless, and Sansa wants to weep with everything she has inside of herself.

Lady growls again, a different sort of noise, and Sansa snuggles closer. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “But my best plan was just- I’m so-”

Sansa doesn’t get to finish the sentence, for there’s a louder growl. Sighing, she sits up to figure out what’s wrong with Lady- when she stops, a flash of white in the corner of her eye. Slowly, she turns.

“Oh,” whispers Sansa. Then, louder, and louder still: “Yes.  _Yes. Yes!”_

Standing in front of her is an answer to every prayer she’s been sending for hours:

_Ghost._


	4. she wears fire for skin but a storm lives in her soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa reaches forwards, to the hands that Jon’s unbound- if she had nails they might have dug into his skin, but she’s bitten them to the quick instead- and looks into his eyes, dark and honest and sharp as her father’s. _I don’t trust anyone,_ she thinks fiercely, but Jon’s hands are warm and alive and she can’t keep herself from gripping them too tightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been a long time in the making! *NOT A YEAR WHY WOULD YOU ACCUSE ME SO TERRIBLY**flings chapter into the void and self into the sun* 
> 
> In honor of the one year anniversary of posting this fic, have bickering siblings and terrible decisions and a Stark family reunion? That's not halfway angsty? I'm SURPRISED at myself.......

****Snow is seeping into Sansa’s clothes.

She refuses to move, however, and even less to give away her position. There can be no mistakes made now: Sansa  _must_  succeed, for the price of failure is too great to contemplate, much less allow.

Lady- Sansa can sense her, vaguely, off behind the small bush she’s hidden behind. She’d yipped some time previous, but the silence now makes her feel wary. Their prey approaches, and Sansa must be fast enough to strike, quick enough to do so without letting him attack her in return.

And then she hears, distantly, the snap of a twig.

Dark Sister is perfectly balanced in one hand. Sansa shifts her weight from one leg to another, then back, ensuring she’s ready to jump out. She breathes in, slowly, and Ghost bounds into the clearing.

Not a few minutes later, so does Jon.

Her breath catches.

He’s older than she remembers; his hair is raggeder, and there’s a stiffness to his shoulders that Sansa hasn’t seen before. If anything, Jon’s grown to look even more like their father.

 _My father._ The truth tastes like ashes in her mouth.  _Jon’s uncle._

“What was so important, boy?” Jon demands of Ghost, pressing his hands to his knees and panting. “That you had to-” he straightens, abruptly, and half-draws his sword out of the scabbard, turning to the shadows exactly opposite to Sansa, from which a soft noise has come. “If anyone’s there…” His voice sounds menacing.

Lady pads out of the darkness, and Sansa makes full use of Jon’s momentary distraction to start moving forwards.

“Lady?” asks Jon, almost reaching out to touch her. “You survived? I didn’t-” he swallows, hard. “I thought you’d died.”

She should keep silent, according to the very plan that she’d hashed out last night- hit Jon over the head, and let him wake up after that, bound so he’s forced to listen to her words. But seeing the way Jon’s hands tremble, as if a strong wind had blown between the spaces of his fingers- Sansa cannot. The weight of a hundred worlds could have borne down on her  tongue, and it would not have mattered.

“She didn’t,” says Sansa, softly. He goes stiff about the shoulders. “And neither did I.”

Jon whirls around, and Sansa has all of a heartbeat to realize that he’s not been calmed by seeing Lady; he’s palmed a knife instead, one that he uses to slash at Sansa’s arm. She stumbles back, sleeve ripping, and Jon uses the moment to draw his sword.

“Who’re you?” he asks, eyes narrowing on her.

Sansa smiles tremulously. “You mean you don’t remember?”

“If you want to talk, you’ll drop that sword.” He doesn’t soften, not even a little, and Sansa feels her heart stumble a little. Her mother, her father- they wouldn’t have recognized her, would they? She’s changed so much that-

“Jon,” she says, struggling to keep her voice even, “I don’t know who you think-”

Her words are cut off when Jon releases a flurry of blows at her, half of which she catches as a matter of habit and the other half of which she deflects by sheer chance. His hands tighten further on his sword’s hilt and Sansa takes two large steps backwards, her lungs aching.

“It’s  _Sansa,”_  she snaps breathlessly. “You absolute moron, it’s  _me,_  stop fighting-”

Jon laughs. Then he says, “My sister’s in King’s Landing. If you want to lie to me, try to do better than that.”

_I don’t want to do this. Listen to me, you utter buffoon!_

“I’m not lying,” says Sansa, fright and irritation melding together into a strange amalgam in her chest to produce an even stranger voice. “Listen, I need you to  _listen-”_

“I think not,” replies Jon, and spins neatly to catch her across her underarm.

Sansa ducks away, a shriek caught in her throat.

(Sansa’s always prepared.

This is one thing that everyone seems to forget about her: she’s never had as native a skill at sewing as everyone seems to assume, but once she realized how important it was for ladies- Sansa’d spent nights and mornings and every spare moment of her time sawing that needle through the cloth until it resembled the primers they’d been given.

Everyone always forgets that.

Jon Snow is not an exception.)

(Now, here’s a tale that hasn’t been told:

When Sansa forgave Elia, there was a scrap of silver that Elia let fall into the sand, far below them both. Elia, Elia, Elia Martell: of Nymeria and Mors, daughter of Arianne, with the sun’s sparks sunk deep into her bones. That silver that fell- it burned and blistered the sand, and when Sansa ran over it hours later it remained hot to the touch, blazing even through the soles of her sandals.

Sansa wrapped it up in cloth soaked in saltwater and remembered grief, and took it with her North.)

…

Sansa ducks away, a shriek building in her throat, and when Jon finishes the spin, turning to meet her, she throws one fistful of sand-embers straight into his face. He backs away, clawing at his eyes. She doesn’t hesitate at that- if there’s one thing she’s learned from Visenya it’s  _do not pause._  Not for pain, not for love, not once you’ve set upon a course.

With all the grace of a barreling ox, Sansa brings Dark Sister’s hilt down on the side of Jon’s head.

…

She goes to get some of the melted snow from her camp, a ways away from where she’d decided to confront Jon. There’s little chance of Jon escaping, but Sansa’s bound his hands and removed both his sword and the visible daggers anyhow. Lugging the water back leaves red marks along her palms- Sansa grits her teeth and bears through the pain.

He’s awake and half-escaped the ropes Sansa’d tied him up with when she returns.

“Gods  _above,”_  Sansa says, driving the bucket into the snow with one sharp motion. “If you continue to do that, I’ll- I’ll dump this water on you, see if I don’t.”

Jon freezes, before slowly relaxing. “This is a dream,” he mutters to himself. The confusion on his face softens Sansa’s ire, just enough for her to seat herself in front of him.

“You dream of me often?”

“No,” he says. “Which is why this is so- surprising.”

“Jon.” He looks up at the tone of her voice, at the abrupt intensity. “This isn’t a dream. There are things I must tell you- necessary things. Dangerous things. Important things. You have to  _listen,_  not run away, not ignore me.”

“And what is so important?” asks Jon, lifting one brow.

“To start out with-” Sansa shifts uneasily, “-you’re in danger. People want to kill you.”

“Hmm.”

Her hand spasms around her knee. “You don’t believe me.”

Jon shrugs his shoulders. “I’ve been in danger ever since I left Winterfell. I don’t need any apparition from the gods to remind me of that.”

“I’m  _not_ an apparition from any god!” Sansa springs to her feet, the surge of emotion in her belly making it impossible to remain seated.

She sucks on her teeth in a vain attempt to stop looking at the melted water. It’s supposed to be used to wash the mud from her hair and prove, finally, unequivocally, that she is who she says she is. But it would feel so good to just throw it on Jon and his stupid, stubborn face.

“Give me one good reason, then,” says Jon, “why Sansa Stark would be here at the Wall. Start with how- how she left King’s Landing, and then with how she survived the trek all the way here, and then with how she came to have- is that  _mud_  on your hair?- short hair, and- and a fucking sword!” He pauses, breathing heavily, before continuing even louder: “A sword! That she knows how to use! You tell me who’d have taught her, and then how she got Ghost to bring me out of the castle, and why, out of all the bloody castles in all the world, she’d choose this one! Answer that and  _yes,_  then I might believe you!”

“I don’t look like her?” Sansa asks. She’s aiming for levity, but it falls flat; it sounds too strained, and she has to hide her flinch at both the wound she’s revealed as well as the thin sound of her voice.

“No,” says Jon, scornfully. “If she ever dressed up as an urchin it’d not last longer than one afternoon. The mud would be too much for Sansa, I think, more than even the hunger.”

 _What a terrible thing,_ Sansa thinks distantly,  _to hear the truth._

But she has her pride, now, along with her love and fear and anger. So she only lifts her chin and smiles and makes sure- with enough ferocity to make even a Targaryen quail- that the smile doesn’t wobble.

“I left King’s Landing through the kitchens.” One breath to keep her voice even, and a second to keep her eyes level, and the third is for no reason other than that she wants it. “I cut my hair and burned it before I left. It wasn’t so difficult, in all honesty: nobody expected that I’d escape on my own, and less that I’d escape disguised as a boy.”  _Not even you, brother mine._  “I stole some food, and some clothes, but not from people who couldn’t afford it.”

“And the sword?”

“Well. That comes to who taught me, and you’d not believe that if you don’t believe the rest of it.”

Jon leans forwards. “Let’s say I believe you, then.”

“Jon-” Sansa says, slowly.

“You want to tell me the story.” His eyes are glittering, hard and unyielding. This is not the brother Sansa knows; this is the Lord Commander that the Night’s Watch has elected. “So tell it.”

“It’s name is Dark Sister.”

There’s a moment’s pause, and then Jon realizes where he’s heard that name. His eyes dip to the sword, and then rise to meet hers, incredulous.

“Made of Valyrian steel,” Sansa continues, when he keeps silent. “Its first owner gave it to me. And she was the one to teach me swordfighting.”

“The first owner was-”

“Visenya.” She inclines her head. “Of House Targaryen.”

Jon’s jaw is slack. He keeps staring at the sword and then back to her. After a moment- he hisses out through his teeth, a sound so derisive it catches in her chest.

“I can see ghosts,” Sansa tells him, the syllables stretching out her throat, thick and glutinous. “Ever since I was three namedays old- I’ve been able to.”

“I’ve had strange dreams,” Jon mumbles, “but never _this_  strange.”

And, abruptly, the frustration fades, replaced instead by exhaustion. “I would be much happier if it were truly a jape,” Sansa says flatly. “Or a dream, or anything but the truth. But it is not. I have lived with this secret for more than a decade, Jon. And I left the Red Keep, I left Riverrun, I left  _Winterfell-_  more than a dozen castles I’ve passed, each one happier than the other to house me and protect me, and I’ve left it all behind to come here.”  _I’ve left behind more than that, as well._  “You can keep thinking it’s a dream if you want, but you’ll have to help me nevertheless.”

He tips his head to the side. “Help- how?”

“There’s a gate.” Sansa reaches forwards, to the hands that Jon’s unbound- if she had nails they might have dug into his skin, but she’s bitten them to the quick instead- and looks into his eyes, dark and honest and sharp as her father’s.  _I don’t trust anyone,_  she thinks fiercely, but Jon’s hands are warm and alive and she can’t keep herself from gripping them too tightly. “In Castle Black. You have to get me through it, to the other side of the Wall.”

…

When Jon goes to pick up the keys, Willam appears to her once more. Sansa sighs and seats herself, quietly, wishing her hair were longer- braiding it would give her something to do with her hands. She feels strained and worn instead. Like licorice pulled thin enough that it was transparent.

Her parents don’t know where she is. Her brother didn’t recognize her, and doesn’t trust her even when she tells him the truth. Sansa Stark, for all that she is alive, might as well not exist.

 _Does it matter where a person is,_  she wants to ask Willam- wants to ask Lyarra, wants to ask Minisa- _if there is no one else in all the world who knows where they are?_

She doesn’t. She leans back and shrugs under Willam’s piercing stare.

“What?” asks Sansa, in the place of all the other things on the tip of her tongue. “I got him to do what needed to be done.”

“He thinks you some creature borne out of the old tales,” Willam responds. “Some prophet, perhaps, or a Child. Anything but his sister.”

“-because it is so unbelievable.”

“Because-” and here, Willam’s tone gentles, just a little, “-you are showing him sides of yourself you have kept shrouded in darkness all your life. It is as if a glass merchant spent all his life selling glass, and then shifted to selling diamond. Will there not be people who come to you, expecting glass wares? Will they not be surprised, startled, when that is not offered to them?”

“Constancy is comfort,” Sansa says, quietly.

Willam smiles at her. “Just so. Change is difficult for people to accept. You should not have approached him as an adversary in the beginning.” He shifts, and shines like snow in the pale sunlight. “You will have to change that, later. It will be more difficult now.”

_It is the truth. Shall you turn from it?_

Months ago, Sansa had sat in the Red Keep and looked at her grandfather, and she’d thought,  _yes._

 _No,_  she thinks now, and she doesn’t know what has changed, knows only that there is cold in her lungs and ice along her scalp and she has stiffened with it instead of freezing alive, knows only that she is stronger within her family’s lands for reasons she cannot explain to anyone, reasons that still exist.  _No, I will not turn away. I will face the worst fears. I swear it._

“My grandfather,” she says, mouth dry. She doesn’t want to continue talking about truths that ache like this. “When I was in the Red Keep, he told me that there was one secret that ought to be told, one secret that wasn’t his place to tell me. He told me to tell Lyarra.”  _But I don’t trust Lyarra. She’s not telling me everything._  “What was it?”

Willam looks a little paler at her words. “Lyarra told me that Rickard’s told you everything.”

“Everything but the first secret.” That had been what Rickard called it, once, casually thrown into their conversations those last few weeks. “The one that began the Stark line.”

Again, there’s hesitation. Slowly, Willam nods; and then he says, softly, “ It is the first secret, and always the last told. Brandon the Builder forbade his sons from ever speaking it, and Brandon the Breaker did the same, but the knowledge has lasted nevertheless.” He frowns. “I never understood it, truth be told- perhaps it shall make more sense to you?”

“What is it?”

“There was a daughter.”

After a pause, Sansa realizes that it’s it; those four words are the secret that Rickard knew, that last bit of Stark knowledge that has been whispered for years, from heir to lord to heir again. She wants to claw at her skin, just a little, with sheer frustration.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” she says, quietly. “Who had a daughter? Why was she- why is she so important? That knowledge of her remains past years and years of loss?”

Willam smiles at her sadly. “‘Tis a mark of growth, to ask questions that your elders cannot answer. Perhaps you shall solve this secret, little daughter. A thing to put your name to, when this is all over.”

 _If I do as Lyarra wishes,_  Sansa thinks, ugliness lining her throat, terror and desire hot in her gut,  _I will put my name on this entire world._

 _They will never forget_ me, _not after all I have lost._

The air is cold and her gloves are thin and her eyes itch. Sansa feels the wind along her thin, thin hair and she imagines a sweep of red down her back, long and beautiful as a hawk’s wings. She is exhausted, bitter, alone. She has never felt fiercer than she has in that moment, the wind billowing her from the back, sunlight shining on that skin, alive against all odds.

_If I cannot be happy, then I will be remembered._

…

Jon doesn’t trust her.

Sansa does, eventually, wash the mud from her hair, but it does little to lessen the suspicion on his face. Even with Lady obeying her commands, docile as a dog, he doesn’t think she is- Sansa Stark- Jon seems to think she’s something else altogether, and not a benign entity at that.

But he smuggles her through the castle quietly; and when they reach the tunnel, Jon doesn’t hesitate to plunge into the darkness.

For a long moment, Sansa hesitates. Then she starts walking, Lady and Ghost keeping time behind her. They pause at one of the iron gates as Jon fumbles at the lock with a key. When the tunnel doesn’t lighten at all, she coughs.

“Where’s- how many gates are there?”

“Three,” Jon answers brusquely. “Two more.”

 _Three._ Sansa can feel her palms growing clammy, but she doesn’t dare loosen her grip on Dark Sister’s hilt to wipe it. In two more gates, she has to be ready to…  _It isn’t kidnapping. It’s saving a life._

And she has both Ghost and Lady on her side.

One more gate, then the last one.

Jon slides the key in, shoulders the slatted steel through, and Sansa emerges into the cold winter light of the world beyond the Wall. His eyes- dark and wary- are fixed on her, not on the snows around them. Sansa feels the pull of that beauty, the desire to see that and admire it, but she puts it aside to focus on her brother.

 _I will not let you die,_ she thinks, and smiles thinly at him.

“Thank you.” Jon relaxes just a little at her words, but Sansa’s not done, not close. She steps forwards and catches his hand. “Come with me,” she whispers. “Your life isn’t safe here, Jon. Even if they don’t do something immediately- people are trying to kill you, and it is always easier to take a life than it is to keep one. And… and it will be better if you were with me.”

“I have sworn vows,” Jon replies, but it’s gentler than he’s sounded in some time. “I have no choice.”

Sansa steps away. The leather of her boots feels like it might creak- it is so old, and her feet are curling with her impatience- but this must be done properly. She hasn’t felt this regretful of something in a long time; even when she left Riverrun, the only pain she bartered with was her own. Now, it is Jon’s she is toying with. His pain, his honor, his life.

If her stay in the south has taught her anything, it is that honor is worth only that value that the person places in it; and that a little pain is preferable to the loss of a life.  _This is necessary,_  she reminds herself.

“You’re right,” Sansa responds, and sees how he softens further at her tone. “I’m very sorry about that, if you must know.”

“I wish-” he breaks off the words abruptly, shaking his head. “Goodbye, then. The debt I owed you for losing to the duel is through. Good travels to you, and-”

“I never loved you as I ought,” Sansa muses, letting one hand fall open to her side. The direwolves are far more intelligent than many people assume, which is to their detriment. But Sansa hadn’t ever thought that even Jon would ignore Ghost’s intellect, which is far beyond that of any common wolf’s or other pet. When she’d explained, the previous night, to him, Ghost had understood her. Sansa’s sure of it. “But that does not mean I would be glad to see you dead. And if, at the end of all of this, you’d like to go back- I would not stop you. But only after Father has come and taken care of these men who wish to kill you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Yes, well,” says Sansa, before Ghost leaps at Jon and bears him down to the ground, before Lady gnaws through Jon’s scabbard and divests him of half his weaponry, “I don’t actually believe that.”

…

While he’s still disoriented, Sansa tosses the keys he’d used to unlock the gates past the first one and then cuts the weight holding the winching gears back. Jon goes rigid when he hears the thunk of the heavy steel door.

“What do you-” he spits, when he gets Lady’s tail whipping straight into his face, “-what- what’re you  _do-”_

“I’m saving your life,” Sansa replies, evenly.

She belts his scabbard over her own waist. It settles easily enough, but is too tight for a second loop and too loose for just one. After a shrug, she slides it over her head so it rests at a diagonal: one part of the strap at her shoulder, another at her hip. It digs into her skin, but it’s the best compromise she currently has.

“Stop,” Jon hisses. “You don’t get to-” One of the direwolves barrels into him; Jon grunts and stumbles forwards. “Our deal is  _finished._  You cannot demand more of me.”

“This is not a deal,” Sansa says. “I never thought of it as one. This is not a debt you are paying me, nor a deal we struck with swords in the woods.”

“Then what is this?” he demands.

She thinks of Willam, sitting beside her, silvered and shining. She thinks of his words:  _There are debts between people, yes, often, but the world is not all of that. There is love as well._  She swallows. “Call it whatever you want. But I am your sister, and I will not let you die for the foolishness of your pride.”

He bristles. “My honor is-”

Sansa reaches forwards and catches his hand, blindly, because she’s looking into his eyes, because she knows Jon will believe this, even if he doesn’t believe that she is real.

“I need help,” she says. “The dead are coming, and I can defeat them, and I ca- I  _will-_  do it alone but- could you live with yourself?” Jon stares at her. “If I defeated them and you could have been beside me but weren’t, because you were afraid?” Sansa remembers Lyarra’s cold, cold hands on the back of her neck, the chill that’s offered her more comfort than almost anything else in her life. “They say that Bran and Rickon are alive, Jon. That they’re beyond the Wall, and alive, and safe.” A moment to catch her breath, and then she adds the last sentence, soft and gentle and all-shaking as an avalanche. “Honor is important, yes, but the world is more important than one man’s honor.”

Jon tears his hands away from her and stumbles away. “These are vows I’ve sworn.”

“I know.”

“There are people relying on me.”

Sansa doesn’t move. “I know.”

“Father would want me to honor what I’ve sworn.”

“Father would want you to honor your duties to your family,” Sansa says, harsher than she’d expected the words to sound. The lie still tastes bitter on her tongue:  _father, father, father._  “And I swear to you, your familial duties lie here, not behind that Wall.”

There’s a pause, not for very long at all; Jon bows his head and Sansa presses her hands together to keep from picking at her nails. Then he lifts his head and-

And he looks like an old, old hero, from one of those old tales. Not a Targaryen knight. Not a King of Winter. There’s a tapestry hidden beside one of the crypts that Torrhen had shown her, once, parchment-thin and crumbly as old leaf, with a man’s profile sketched in large, broad swathes.

It’s faded.

It’s glorious.

That’s what Jon looks like, Sansa thinks. Old worries on a young face, beauty on bones that weren’t built to carry them, strength dug up out of salt and snow and somehow still rooted deep. She wants to shrink away from the depths of the emotions she feels upon seeing his face; she wants to reach out and embrace it, let it burn her until she is nothing but ashes.

 _Targaryen,_  a voice breathes into her ear, and she realizes- Visenya. He is Visenya, but younger, but tempered, but more loved than Visenya has ever known in centuries of either life or death.  _Stark,_  too, as Stark as Arya, who’d been loved and adored for all she’d never obeyed anyone’s orders, but brighter, but uglier.

“Give me my sword,” says Jon, and the spell shatters as if someone had struck it with a hammer.

Sansa shudders back to life. “Yes,” she says, a little numbly. “Yes, I will- do that.”

 _Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen._ She cannot breathe for the weight of the lies, none of them hers. There are tears in her eyes, and Sansa bites them back until her throat aches.  _You have brought something into this world that is more terrible than you could have ever thought._

Jon hesitates, and then he firms his shoulders. “Which direction are we going?”

…

They walk for hours.

It is strange, to be with someone whose needs must be met- Sansa has gotten used to the dead, who are tireless and limited only by the boundaries they can cross. But Jon must eat and drink and sleep, so they trade watches, and divide the food as evenly as they can.

Sansa doesn’t realize that Jon doesn’t believe her.

He doesn’t, though- not until almost a sennight after they set out.

They’re pitching their camp, and Sansa’s stirring the fire with a knobbly stick while Jon returns with enough wood to keep the fire going through the night. There’s dried berries and the remains of a snow hare for dinner; Sansa feels nausea dig into her, so she hums a little ditty to herself.

It isn’t much. Just a little girl’s rendition of the sea shanties that Theon Stark had taught her, which were two octaves lower than her own voice. Barely audible, even to herself.

Jon, across the camp, hearing her over the crackle of the fire, stills. He mumbles something into the wood.

“Pardon?” asks Sansa.

He turns to her. And Jon’s eyes- Sansa hasn’t ever seen them like that before, liquid-bright and hot with something that could have been either horror or ecstasy. “Do that again,” he whispers, “that- song. The humming.”

One up, three down, each note sharper than any sea shanty would ever be, but carrying its same rhythm. Sansa eyes Jon suspiciously but sings nevertheless.

Jon’s face can’t seem to decide what it feels. He pales further, until he looks like a half-ghost. Then he says, “Sa-” his voice breaks, picking up momentum a breath later, “Sansa?”

“Yes?” She flattens her hands on the fabric covering her knees.

“It’s you,” he says. “I thought- I’d forgotten that- oh, gods.” He sits down on the ground, right there, looking sick and joyous all at once.

“Yes,” Sansa says slowly. “I am myself. Is something the-”

“I hadn’t-” Jon looks as white as a ghost. “I thought you were some- something else. A- a story Old Nan hadn’t remembered to tell us.”

Sansa lifts an eyebrow. “And that was more believable to you than me being myself.”

“You aren’t-” he gestures violently, before reaching up to scrub through his hair. “You aren’t supposed to  _be_  like this.”

“Alive?”

“Dirty.” His eyes narrow on her, and Sansa feels her amusement rise to match his annoyance. “What changed?”

She keeps her face as blank as she can make it, though her lips certainly twitch. “Being trained by a woman who conquered an entire continent has the ability to change a lot of things.”

“You were not trained by Visenya Targaryen.”

“Was so.” Sansa leans back, eyes wide and innocent. “Did you know that she hates our grandfather?”

Jon sputters. “You did  _not_  speak to our grandfather.”

“He was a tall man.” She gnaws on the inside of her cheek to still her smile, though she can’t quite hide it entirely. “Grumpy, too. I see where you get it from.”

“Sansa,” he sighs.

 _“Jon,”_  she mimics, before dropping the amusement. “I know it’s difficult to imagine. But you’ve seen the dead- the actual  _dead-_  and the Night’s King. Do you think me being able to see ghosts is so very different?”

“Yes,” he says plainly. “It’s one thing to think the old stories are true. It’s another to think that my sister’s been lying to me for her entire life. Lying to everyone.”

Sansa folds her hands over her lap. “I didn’t lie.”

“You didn’t tell us.”

“Yes, because that would have gone over so well with Mother and Father,” Sansa says flatly. “Oh, yes, I’ve sown all the samplers you want, Mother, I’ve done the letters you want, Father, and, by the way, I had a  _fascinating_  conversation with Torrhen Stark on how his daughter planted the first blue roses in Winterfell, that’s why I didn’t fall asleep the way Arya did this afternoon!”

She’s shouting by the end. Her eyes burn, just a little, but she pushes it away in favor of gripping her wrists tightly.

“Father would have-” Jon exhales, whistling it out through his teeth, “-I don’t know. I don’t know what he’d have done, because this is- this is- so strange.”

“So you understand,” Sansa says.

Jon moves closer to her, slowly, hesitantly- he raises his hand as if he means to draw her into an embrace, and then he drops it to cuff her shoulder instead. “I know that they love you. Your mother might not have…” he trails off, awkwardly, before settling against the log, back against her shins. “Liked me, all that much. But she’s always loved you, all of you. Arya at her brattiest. Robb at his angriest. You remember how much she yelled at Bran?”

For weeks on end. Sansa remembers: her mother rigid with anger and worry, Bran limber and long-limbed. Every morning for two years, they’d been woken by Catelyn yelling at Bran for climbing; so much it had become a routine, and still Bran had never thought she didn’t love him.

Even in King’s Landing- nobody, not a single soul, had ever doubted in Catelyn Stark’s love for her children.

“Yes,” says Sansa, soundless.

“We would have understood.” He huffs a laugh. “Or tried. We would have tried our best, at the least.”

Sansa curls over her hands, hunching against the cold. “Perhaps,” she says.

…

 _I don’t trust you,_ thinks Sansa, hands cold, heart colder.  _I don’t believe you._

…

“How did you realize it was me?”

“Those songs. Nobody else ever liked them enough to remember.”

“So you knew I was myself because I sang a sea shanty?”

“I knew you were yourself because nobody else could have sung it that badly.”

_“Jon!”_

…

A week later, Sansa wakes to find a third wolf in their midst.

“Summer,” breathes Jon.

Sansa snaps her head towards him. “They’re alive. Bran and Rickon.”

“You didn’t believe them?” Jon asks. “Your ghosts-”

“I wasn’t certain.” She runs her fingers down Summer’s dark fur. “I couldn’t be certain. There’s been so many lies, you know- secrets, forgotten truths- I haven’t trusted anyone. In a long time.”

“Except for me,” says Jon.

Then he seems to understand what Sansa’s averted face means: Jon flinches as if she’s struck him, and he steps forwards to look at her closer.

“Sansa,” he says.

She tilts her head up to meet his gaze. “It isn’t anyone else’s fault,” she says quietly. “I don’t know if I  _can,_  anymore. Or if I ever could. I never really even considered telling anyone about how I could see ghosts, and that was before Rickard and Visenya… drove that point home.”

Jon looks horrified for a long minute, but then he scoffs- scoffs and drops to sit next to her, looking vaguely irritated.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “Trust isn’t something that’s- that’s like hair color, or your height, or anything like that. It’s not something you’re born with. It- it certainly isn’t your fault, Sansa, if people thought the truth was too dangerous to tell others.” He turns, and eyes- Father’s eyes- pierce through all of Sansa’s shields, leave her open and bare and armorless. “It isn’t your fault that people gave you secrets to hold.”

 _This,_ Sansa thinks contemplatively, _is the happiest I’ve felt in years._

She’s hungry, cold, lonely. She’s never even imagined that her family might try to accept her for who she is- never even allowed that hope to materialize. Sansa swallows, and rises to her feet, and when she turns to help Jon to his feet, she pulls him into a hug as well.

He’s so warm.

(Sansa’s tears are soft things, born of Minisa and the giving, fertile loam of the Riverlands. But now- her tears are cold, sharp; they burn down her face like ice cracking the earth open. Sansa doesn’t regret the pain at all.

They’re tears of joy.)

…

Summer leads them.

Sansa can’t find it in herself to breathe, but somehow she manages. Somehow, she keeps herself moving: one foot after the other, one breath in after another, hope and fear swirling in her wake like footprints embedded in snow.

Bran’s  _alive,_  and Sansa’s near him- so close- they’ll be together again.

Them. Their family. In a snow-ridden wasteland, hurt, so close to being cleaved apart.

But together.

 _The pack survives._  Sansa keeps walking, Jon beside her, head up as if scenting the wind. They are not wolves, not truly; but right then, Sansa thinks she’ll shred anyone who tries to keep her from Bran to pieces. Right then, she cannot imagine that she is fangless, clawless.  _I have been alone for too long._

…

They emerge, three direwolves and two fur-bundled humans, into the middle of a dark clearing.

There are numerous people there.

There is only one person that Sansa cares about. She rises to her toes, straining for a glimpse of-

“Bran,” whispers Sansa, at the shine of his red hair.

It’s strange: Sansa is the slower of them, between her, and the direwolves, and Jon.

Perhaps there are wings that grow on her feet. Perhaps the wind aids her. Perhaps it’s love, that gives her the speed to move so quickly. She feels something similar to it, at least: like solid flesh and blood has been replaced, for just a breath, with wind and ice.

Because she reaches Bran before Jon.

Bran, who is alive under her arms, who is warm and grown larger than the comatose figure she’d last seen, who is  _alive,_  as she hasn’t dreamt possible for months.

Then Jon is there, and he’s holding onto Bran just as tightly, likely leaving bruises on both of their shoulders- but Sansa doesn’t care. She couldn’t possibly care about anything, not with her brothers beside her, safe and alive and in her arms.

…

They finally settle in a cave a little distant from the clearing Summer had led them to. It’s large and dark, but dry; and when one of the others lights a match, Sansa realizes that they aren’t wildlings at all.

Jon starts swearing when he finally sees the same thing.

“They aren’t enemies,” says Bran quietly, when he finally deciphers what both of their sputtering means. “They’re- they saved my life. We were running, Meera and Jojen and I, and would’ve been caught without Leaf’s help. She brought us here.”

“Bran-”

Sansa looks at them- the crowd that had allowed Bran to so much as meet them outside, for they’d been the ones to wheel him out, certainly- and tries to pick out what, exactly, is leaving her so unnerved. Perhaps it’s the features, which are so similar to her own and yet alien; perhaps it’s the eyes, which are large and slitted as a cat. Perhaps it’s the grace with which they move, too swift and curving for any human.

But Sansa’s known ghosts for long enough to push past the initial terror, to search for the ground on which a bond can grow, so she tilts her head back at Bran.

“You’re certain?” she asks, just as lowly.

He nods.

There’s no hesitation there at all, and it’s that which makes her mind up, more than anything else.

“Jon,” she says. “Calm down.”

He jerks his head irritably at her. Sansa ignores him, and gets up, moving slowly towards the crowd.

“I’m Sansa,” she says, when she’s close enough for them to know that she’s addressing them, when it’s unmistakable. “Bran’s sister. And this is Jon- he’s our brother. We… we’re here to help. Jon’s spent years fighting the dead. He’ll be invaluable to you.”

One of the Children steps forwards slowly. “We have not the numbers for fighting,” they say, in a voice that rolls over Sansa’s skin like thunder. “And less of the will. What use have we for a commander with no forces to command?”

“Speak not for others,” advises another of the Children, “only for yourself.”

A third one, with a voice that’s high and sweet, says, “I see you, sister of Bran.”

Everyone falls silent at that. Behind her, Sansa can hear Bran inhale sharply. But nobody seems willing to elaborate on the statement, not until a child steps out of the crowd. It’s too dark to make out much of their face.

“You shine almost as bright as the Crow,” she says slowly, deliberately. “Your brother has the potential to, and it shines as sparks off a stone in his chest. But you? Oh, you shed the light in your wake. His potential is realized in you, all without a weirwood to ground it.”

“I don’t understand,” says Sansa. She watches, numbly, as the child raises one hand to almost brush over her chest.

Then she feels someone dragging her backwards, and before she can blink, she’s set behind Jon- who’s standing in front of her with his shoulders thrown back, his legs spread as if to take a blow. “Stay back,” he growls.

Bran reaches up and grips Sansa’s wrist, dragging her attention back to him. “She’s blind,” he whispers. “She can see magic. Only magic. She’s very old, and-”

Sansa looks up, and sees the child tilt her head at Jon. Sees her say, “Oh, fire and ice. Alone they are common enough, but together? There are things that ought not to be in this world. You are one of them.”

“That’s enough,” says Bran, and it’s authoritative enough that they all fall silent. Even Jon stops bristling enough to be surprised that he’s listening to Bran; Sansa’s surprised enough, because she remembers how quiet he’d been. Those months of watching Robb lead must have affected him in some manner though, and if this is it, she’ll take it and be glad. “Perhaps we can-”

“The Crow will wish to see her,” says the child. “And him, I suppose, if for nothing more than the fire.”

Bran nods as if her words make sense.

“Let’s go, then,” he says.

…

They arrive at a weirwood tree. The hall is well-lit, which is why Sansa can see the man sitting atop a seat made of the weirwood roots- he’s pale and gaunt, save for a patchy rash running from the side of his neck up to his cheekbone. Fine, thin strands of silvery hair are in disarray around him.

“Who are you?” Sansa asks carefully.

He tilts his head to her, but doesn’t speak for a long minute. Sansa wonders if he’s even going to answer- but then he does.

“I am the three-eyed Crow,” he says, voice hoarse and rasping. It makes Sansa want to shiver out of her skin, the unearthly scrape of it. “But I was not always this. Perhaps you have heard of a lord named Brynden?”

“Brynden Waters,” breathes Sansa.

“Yes,” says the man- Brynden, Brynden Waters, the person she’s been charged with meeting by her grandmother and Visenya, two people who’d likely never agree on anything else from this to the end of time. “You know of me, then.”

Hands shaking, Sansa undoes her scabbard and removes Dark Sister.

“You would know this blade,” she says.

He laughs. “I would know that blade even if I’d not seen it in half a thousand dreams. How came a Stark by Dark Sister?”

“By Visenya’s own tutelage.”

“She does not tutor often,” says Brynden, voice turning even slower, ponderous. “Those she takes an interest in are great, always, no matter whether they are terrible or wonderful. It is a gift that she has, my many-times grandmother. To find the best and know them, even when they do not know it themselves. Tell me, daughter of House Stark: what would drive a girl with Visenya’s stamp to come this far north?”

“The dead,” says Sansa, swallowing. “As it drove you, once.”

“I came to the Wall because I did not wish to die.”

“And you crossed it because there was something happening, and you wished to know what it was.” Sansa juts her chin upwards. “I know that the dead are there. My brother- Jon- has fought against armies of them. Legions. Ghosts that have never feared for anything in their entire existence are shivering, timorous beings. And I know that I can help against them.”

“Do you?” asks Brynden, slowly shifting forwards, like a tree bending in a strong gale. “Tell me what you will do.”

Sansa stares into his lone, red eye. “I don’t know,” she says. Jon makes an aborted sound behind her; she ignores him. “But you do.”

Again, there’s silence. This time, it doesn’t stay silent, not for Sansa. Her heartbeat echoes and echoes against her ears, thundering like a drum. She’s gambled so much on three words. If she’s wrong- if her grandmother, if her grandfather- are wrong-

Death will be the least of her worries.

But then, Brynden Waters nods. Short, shaky; but a nod nevertheless.

“I do,” he says. “But it is a long tale. And to appreciate it properly, you shall need- need to know more.”

“More of what?” asks Sansa sharply.

“What is the final secret of your house, Sansa Stark?”

“How would you-”

“Tell him,” says Bran, who’s seated beside her. His eyes are glowing, in the dim light. It looks so strange. “He knows it already, Sansa.”

Reluctantly, Sansa says, “There was a daughter.”

“Yes,” says Brynden, softly. “There was.” Then, a little more briskly: “Take rest for now. Sleep, eat; the Children shall help you. And tonight, they shall tell you a story. It will answer some of your questions, I’m certain.”

He doesn’t speak again.

…

That night, Sansa’s seated besides Jon in an enormous cavern. She’s eaten some sort of a stew; it’s not very filling, but is very warm, so she’s rather grateful for it anyhow. Then the quiet movements around her still- people seat themselves, settle in as always for stories, the same way people would do in Winterfell’s Great Hall.

The Children whisper amongst each other, a gentle susurration of sound. Sansa waits.

Finally, a woman steps forward- or, Sansa thinks it’s a woman; she has more delicate features than some of the others, and a slightly higher voice- and she speaks, words accented strangely.

“I remember a time millennia past,” she says, “that you cannot possibly imagine. Things of wonder and horror and magic.” She pauses, and her green eyes glow brighter. “You have said that you know of the Pact. For years after signing it, we had peace. Many of our number did not think it possible- that your people could ever honor something when they loved its opposite so dearly, for not a single year went by without war of some sort. But you managed to hold the treaty for centuries. And then you came for our forests.”

Another child says something, cutting her off. They sound irritable, or perhaps reprimanding; the one who’d spoken responds sharply and they fall into an argument that slithers around Sansa’s ears as so many snakes.

“Are you certain-”

 _“Yes,”_ Sansa replies, hissing, into Jon’s ear. Yes, she is certain this is necessary. Not a good idea, perhaps. Not a safe idea, perhaps. But these people haven’t hurt Bran in the weeks that he’s been with them, and she also knows full well how it feels to have a person- a real, live person, with even the slightest bit of power- ask for an explanation without ulterior motives. They want to tell her this story. It might not be easy, but- she can feel its importance already, in the way the words trip up her spine like so many warmed stones.

Finally, the child who’d spoken returns her attention to them. “My- companion-” she says, in a voice that lets Sansa know how this admission galls her, “-wishes you to know that your people’s greed was not all of it. There were offerings given, and treaties struck, and we responded to a few cases of greed with overmuch zeal.”

“Offerings?” Jon inquires.

He could sound more polite, but he could also sound far less. Sansa decides to cut her losses instead of snapping at him.

“Of wool, and silks, and meat that dwells in flatlands that we hadn’t access to for years.” The child shrugs. “You wished for wood, and we offered that in return for all of those things. But some men took more than they gave. When we went to your kings… they did not hear us. They did not listen.” She lowers her voice, until it sounds like the wind’s rasp through a tree’s leaves. “One of the proudest, one of the greatest, was Brandon Builder. We do not have kings, did not have them even when our numbers rivalled your own- but we saw through the trees and realized you would not listen if we sent one of us alone to you. So we sang a child out of the mud, each one of us giving him a gift of our own. And we sent him to your king, this child of the Children.”

“Do you know what he said?” another child asks. This one has a rounder face, sharper cheekbones; he looks younger than the first one. “Brandon Builder, your thousand-times forefather- he refused to hear us. And when our child returned, he called us together for war.”

The first one continues: “The child was not the proper answer to our problems. We had wished to ready him for kings, and in doing so we made him too proud. Too vengeful. He led us into a war we were not ready for, for reasons none of us knew save for injured pride and revenge.” She snorts. “The first act of the war was our last.”

 _One act,_ Sansa thinks, fingers drumming against her thigh. _One act, so terrible it destroyed an entire race._

“Brandon Builder had one daughter,” says the second child.

Jon shakes his head almost immediately. “He had only sons,” he challenges. “Three sons, and no daughters. If there’s one thing everyone agrees upon-”

 _The first truth,_  Sansa thinks, a chill gripping her bones.  _The oldest Stark truth: there was a daughter._

“Jon,” she says, reaching out to grip his elbow, eyes affixed to the children. “Just- listen.”

“He had five sons,” whispers the first child. “I know it well, Stark-son. I was there for it all. He had five sons: one heir and another with arrows sharp as dragonglass and another with a tongue even sharper and another with eyes bright as a sunrise and another with a gift for crafting that even his father did not have; and one daughter: her name was-” she says something, a long, liquid stream of syllables that makes Sansa shiver; it slips out of her mind almost immediately, however, and for all that she tries, she cannot remember it.

She smiles thinly. “You will not remember her name. Only those who knew her before she- she became what she is now, can know it. We sacrificed that in the name of our vengeance.”

Jon turns his head towards Sansa, creakingly slowly. There’s an old terror in his eyes, and she finds herself reaching forwards, slotting her fingers through his.

“How?” Sansa asks, quietly.  _How do you unmake a name? How is that_  possible?

“The child that we made- he was made, you see. Until him- Children appeared. We are of the trees and the streams, and when the magic is enough we are formed, whole. That is how I came, from a poplar tree; that is how-” another string of syllables that Sansa could not pronounce, though this one stays in her mind, “-came, from a stone rounded at the bend of a river. It is how we all come. Until we made  _him,_  and though he looked and spoke and sang as if one of us, he did not have what we have.”

“And what is that?”

“Contentment.” She reaches forwards and the trees before her burst into flowers- greenish rim, with a scarlet middle. Poplar flowers. “When the land has enough, it is contented. It is not  _greedy._  But he did not have that in him, though he had enough to know what he did not have.”

Jon lifts one eyebrow. “Humans can be greedy.”

“Not this kind of greedy. The kind where you have nothing inside of you, where there is a coldness within in the place of a soul. He wanted. And so he took, and named it vengeance so we would follow him.”

“He formed the Others, then,” Sansa says, with certainty. Horror is there, yes, but the world seems to thrum above that, a drum-beat in echo with her heart. This is important, and a history that ought to be known. “He cut souls out of other- people, didn’t he?”

The first child closes her hand into a fist, and the poplar flowers shrivel. “We stole Brandon Builder’s daughter. And we watched as he did it- as he transferred her soul into his body. But souls are not meant to be cut out like that, nor to be touched by mortal hands. It was not a good job- he left pieces behind in her, of her soul, could not do enough. He was vaporized- the world caved in around us. We all nearly died. And the Night’s Queen was formed.”

“Brandon Builder raged.” The other child’s voice rustles, like water, like waves. She sounds empty. “She was beautiful and terrible and there was nothing that we could do against her. So we went to him, and Brandon Builder killed our envoys, led an army of a hundred thousand into our forests and cut us down where we slept.”

“The Night’s Queen killed us for the emptiness of her soul, and Brandon Builder killed us for our cruelty. At first she fed on Children alone; but when humans came too close, she had few compunctions about killing them as well.”

“She killed two of her brothers,” says the second child. “The heir, and the crafter. They who had tried to bring back their sister died before even uttering a word, and finally, still mourning, Brandon Builder called his people together and built a monument that still lasts to this day.”

_What in the world-_

“The Wall,” whispers Jon.

The Children hiss angrily at the word. It takes Sansa a moment to understand, because- well, they’ve not understood anything Sansa and Jon have said in the entire conversation; or at least they’ve pretended not to- but this word, this single word- it’s not in the Old Tongue, but the children know it.

 _Wall,_ thinks Sansa. The word they use now recalls the structure that Brandon built. It is, perhaps, the oldest word in their language.

The first child inclines her head slowly. “Eight thousand years later, and we still cannot approach it. The magic woven into it- it’s something that repels us. We cannot cross it.”

“And so,” Jon says flatly, “you died out.”

The second folds her hands together. “Even so. The last great thing we did was to erase her from history. Her name is gone. No longer can it remain in memory or writing, save for those who were alive and knew it before the spell was cast. And year by year, that number lessens. Until all those left are those before you now, whittled down to tens that once numbered millions.”

“Why?” whispers Sansa.

“Because,” says the first child, “you asked.”

“A name gives power,” says the second child. “Quiet power. Still power. But power nonetheless. Why do you think you name your sons Brandon? Because there is a power to it, one that you know but cannot understand. The Night’s Queen’s father knew this, and didn’t wish for it to happen. He had lost almost everything to us. Two sons, his sole daughter; the peace he’d fought for all his life. And he came to us and asked us for one boon.”

“A hollow boon, perhaps, but a boon nevertheless.” The first child smiles, ghastly. “We gave it to him. You know what we called it, when we did?  _The highest kindness._  The best apology we could make.”

“Was it enough?” asks Jon.

Sansa knows the answer before ever the Children speak. How can it ever be enough? Life for a life is unequal, always. One life can never be matched by another. Hundreds? Thousands? It is like asking which is more devastating: the tides, or the floods. Each, in its own way.

“No,” says the first child. “But we tried.”

There’s a scraping sound from the weirwood throne- Sansa jerks her head up and looks at Brynden Waters, whom she’d forgotten existed, while listening to the story.

“You asked what you can do, Sansa Stark,” he says, scrapingly slowly. “And this is your answer: you are the latest descendant of this house, which has scarred this land immeasurably. It is your burden. To stand; to fight. What can you do? You are a protector. Stripped bare, carved hollow, bleeding and weeping to death- you are a protector.” He smiles, and it carves into his face like a weirwood’s tears. “What can you do? You can protect.”

“She’s-” Jon begins.

But Brynden speaks over him, like he isn’t even there.

“Your brother will keep greenseeing alive. Those are older traditions than those of House Stark. But for this war? You will need to fight its most vital battle. You will need to be unfaltering. Stronger than any other. Stronger than even you can imagine.”

Jon’s shaking his head. Bran looks pale, strained. The other Children are shifting uneasily.

Sansa lifts her head, meets Brynden Waters’ lone, red eye.

“Where do I fight it?” she asks.


End file.
